Neighbor plots: the ethics of strangeness in the modern Gothic

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Summarize

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Neighbor Plots:
The Ethics of Strangeness in the Modern Gothic

by

Naomi Greenwald

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)

August 2015

Committee Members: Hilary Schor, Peggy Kamuf, and Bill Handley

Copyright 2015 Naomi Greenwald
ii
Dedication

For my family
and
Kenzo

iii
Acknowledgments
As I add the finishing details on a dissertation focused on the neighbor and ethical
neighbor praxis, it occurs to me that if it weren’t for my husband who leaves the house and goes
to work every day, our Los Angeles neighbors would have thought we moved away a while ago.
That’s the kind of neighbor I have been. Without the love, support, and patience of my husband,
our families, and our friends—and, of course, the Dissertation Completion Fellowship—I would
never have been able to be such a recluse this past year and give this project the full and
undivided attention that it required. For this, I am incredibly grateful.
Of course, this project would never have happened in the first place had my advisor,
Hilary Schor, not given me the courage to pursue this topic; since the seminar paper I wrote for
her where I first broached the idea of a neighbor plot, she has supported me with her brilliance.
As have Peggy Kamuf and Bill Handley, who agreed to be on my committee, and who I’ve had
the good fortune to work with over the years. Peggy, who I interviewed with so many years ago
when I visited USC as a prospective student, has taught me the necessary skills to become a
better writer and a better thinker. And Bill Handley probably still does not realize how many
ideas he inspired in this project, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to sit in on one of
his undergraduate courses in fall 2013 and observe how teaching is done.
Thank you to USC for the fellowships and grants that made all this research possible, and
for allowing me to stay on as a postdoctoral fellow—I was not ready to part ways yet! To Mary
Traester and Emilie Garrigou Kempton, thank you and beyond for reading my work and urging
me on. Kenzo, I truly could not have done this without you—you have had my back every step
of the way, and I am so lucky to have you and your mom, Diana, Carole, and Kiyoshi in my life.
iv
And finally, to my parents and my gigantic and amazing family who mean everything, and a
special thank you to my brother Zachary, my pro bono editor who always saves the day.

v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract vi

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Plotting the Neighbor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Early Writing 15

Chapter Two: The Traveling Companion or, The Legend of Two Brothers, Jekyll &
Hyde 52

Chapter Three: The Myth of Community in Shirley Jackson’s Gothic 86

Chapter Four: “Somewhere between here and there”: Neighboring Narratives in
The Lottery 135

Chapter Five: “On the moon . . .”: Alternative Endings in We Have Always Lived in
the Castle 187

Epilogue: Of Chalk Lines 225

Works Cited 230

vi
Abstract
Neighbor Plots: The Ethics of Strangeness in the Modern Gothic argues that the figure of
neighbor, and the attendant concept of neighbor-love, occupy a space in the Gothic fiction of
Robert Louis Stevenson and Shirley Jackson. Because these authors use the Gothic mode for
rather un-Gothic effects, their fiction not only reveals the instability of the traditional dichotomy
of self and other, but it also plots the potential site of a modern ethics of neighborliness. In order
to envision what such a neighbor praxis might look like, I read Stevenson and Jackson’s Gothic
narratives alongside the ethical philosophies of modern thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray.
In the first section of this dissertation, I enlist “Thrawn Janet” (1881), “The Body
Snatcher” (1884), and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to argue that Stevenson’s
innovative Gothic fiction can be viewed as a testing ground for the central thesis he presents in
Lay Morals, an unfinished treatise on ethics he drafted in the late 1870s—namely, that an ethical
relation to the other begins by discerning the voice of the neighbor within. With each successive
neighbor plot, Stevenson introduces an increasingly isolated and violently self-serving
protagonist, and ultimately, Stevenson’s fiction suggests that ethical subjectivity can only be
initiated by looking out.
In Shirley Jackson’s Gothic neighbor plots, the exclusionary practices of what Jean-Luc
Nancy calls the operative community endanger the potential of a neighbor praxis from the very
start. From the previously unpublished short story “The Man in the Woods” (2014), to The Road
Through the Wall (1948), and The Lottery or, The Adventure of James Harris (1949), Jackson is
engaged in interrupting the myth of community. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962),
vii
Jackson’s final completed novel, she offers the story of two sisters who have the audacity to
dwell in a radical alternative, and it is on the threshold of Merricat and Constance’s “castle” that
the possibility of neighbor-love and an ethics of hospitality begin to emerge.
1
Introduction
If the Bible offered any certainty about what it means to be or to love a neighbor, the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic fiction I’ve enlisted for this project offers little more
than anxiety. And yet, as threatening, exclusionary, incurious, or apathetic as the fictional
neighbor might be, in Neighbor Plots: The Ethics of Strangeness in the Modern Gothic, I will
argue that the figure of neighbor, and the attendant concept of neighbor-love, still occupy a space
in the Gothic fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and Shirley Jackson. I will demonstrate that
these authors use the Gothic mode for rather un-Gothic effects; their fiction not only reveals the
instability of the traditional dichotomy of self and other, it also plots the potential site of a
modern ethics of neighborliness.
1

The Gothic has taken a variety of forms since its advent in the middle to late eighteenth
century, and while there are certain narrative elements and tropes that seem familiar to the
Gothic literary tradition in general, they are also familiar to various related categories such as
ghost or horror stories, the macabre, or the supernatural (Baldick xi). There are also several
difficulties with the word “Gothic”—from its anachronistic origins and pejorative connotations,
to the incompatibility between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature—but in his introduction
to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992), Chris Baldick asserts that the most troublesome

1
“Neighbor” is a combination of “nigh adj.” and “boor n.”; its prefix denotes spatial and/or temporal proximity,
and its suffix, which is closely connected to “bower n.,” denotes a dweller or abode (“Neighbor, n. and adj.”). Thus,
the etymology reveals that the meaning of “neighbor” is relative and contingent, which, as I will show, is reflected
in the way that the neighbor has been used in religioethical and sociopolitical concepts. In the first, the neighbor
connotes an unspecified category of fellow human beings to whom we are responsible; in the second, “neighbors
constitute a zone of indistinction between friends and enemies, the familiar and the strange, where alliances are
contingent and hospitality easily slips into hostility” (“Neighbor” UD).
2
aspect of the term is that the literary Gothic is actually anti-Gothic (xiii).
2
In fact, he posits that
this “ingrained distrust of medieval civilization and its representation of the past primarily in
terms of tyranny and superstition” is actually what distinguishes the Gothic from similar fictional
forms (xiii, xx).
3
Building on Baldick’s assertion of the anti-Gothicism of the Gothic, Robert
Mighall argues “The Gothic dwells in the historical past, or identified ‘pastness’ in the present,
to reinforce a distance between the enlightened now and the repressive or misguided then” (A
Geography xviii).
By arguing for the anti-Gothicism of the Gothic, Baldick and Mighall are recapitulating
the range of mythic oppositions—Dark Ages v. Enlightenment, medieval v. modern, barbarity v.
civility, superstition v. Reason (Baldick xvii)—that are typically reflected in Gothic fiction. But
Stevenson and Jackson’s narratives do not conform to the anti-Gothicism that Baldick and
Mighall believe is central to the tradition; while their Gothic doesn’t “reject the advantages of
enlightenment, modernity, and civilization in an irrational gesture of historical reversal” (xviii),
it also resists elevating the present by putting it in stark contrast with the past. More generally,
Stevenson and Jackson do not use the Gothic to reinforce mythic oppositions, but rather, to
destabilize the lines between self and other, and “the enlightened now and the repressive or
misguided then” (Mighall, A Geography xviii). Without reducing the differences between

2
In its earliest sense, the adjective “Gothic” denotes the language and ethnic identity of the Goths (xii), or the
ancient Germanic peoples who sacked Rome in the fourth century (Mighall, A Geography xv), but by the late-
eighteenth century, “Gothic” was “commonly used to mean ‘medieval, therefore barbarous’, in a largely
unquestioned equation of civilization with classical standards” (Baldick xii). The literary Gothic depends on this
later meaning; its foundational text, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), “is a tale
concerned with the brutality, cruelty, and superstition of the Middle Ages” (xii). The crucial difference between
Gothic literature and Gothic architecture is that unlike the latter, which experienced a serious revival in the
nineteenth century, the literary Gothic never involves a positive cultural revaluation (xiii).
3
Baldick says that “one would not be writing a Gothic tale unless one links the subject-matter in some way to
the antiquated tyrannies and dynastic corruptions of an aristocratic power or at least of a proud old provincial family.
Moulding our common existential dread into the more particular shapes of Gothic fiction, then, is a set of ‘historical
fears’ focusing upon the memory of an age-old regime of oppression and persecution which threatens still to fix its
dead hand upon us. . . . It is a middle-class tradition, and its anxiety may be characterized briefly as a fear of
historical reversion; that is, of the nagging possibility that the despotisms buried by the modern age may prove to be
yet undead” (xxi).
3
individuals and communities across space and time, these authors self-consciously engage with
the Gothic as a modality in order to problematize the various binary constructions that anti-
Gothicism would like to uphold. Ultimately, Stevenson and Jackson use the Gothic’s negative
aesthetics against the Gothic mode itself, which is why their fiction produces rather un-Gothic
effects; fictional worlds comprised of atomistic relationships draw our attention to the possibility
of recognizing proximity, contiguity, plurality, and liminality within our own.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) were born sixty-
six years and approximately five thousand miles apart, but when it comes to their fiction, they
are near neighbors. Jackson and Stevenson were both remarkably versatile writers who seemed
to transition effortlessly between short stories, novels, essays, historical nonfiction, family
memoirs (Jackson), poetry (Stevenson), and so on. They experimented with similar genres and
incorporated various “low” or “popular” fictional forms, including detective stories, folklore,
children’s literature, weird fiction, and true crime narratives, and, as a result, have been
marginalized within the their respective canons. They used their fiction to engage with similar
areas of scholarship, including demonology, British balladry, philosophy, late-Victorian
anthropology, psychology, religion, and contemporary print journalism. They were wary of
Enlightenment discourse and wrote fiction compatible with postmodern literary theory.
There are, of course, many differences between Stevenson and Jackson, including their
approach to the Gothic neighbor plot. And while it is tempting to attribute their characteristically
distinct approaches to sexual difference, it would go against the spirit of this project to uphold
such an unnecessarily reductive (though not completely invalid) assertion that would require that
I pretend that the distinct historical and sociocultural contexts of each writer were of no
consequence, let alone the countless other factors that made Stevenson Stevenson and Jackson
4
Jackson. I will, however, present the following generalization for the sake of familiarizing the
reader with the overall direction of this study: whereas Stevenson’s neighbor plots usually focus
on individuals whose power-to-do involves the capacity for power-over others, Jackson’s
neighbor plots usually focus on marginalized individuals with only a modicum of power-to-do to
begin with. To put it another way, Stevenson would start by asking what might prevent a man,
interested in getting from A to B, from trampling over a young girl who happens to be in his
path, while Jackson would start by asking why the community is indifferent to the fact that a
young girl is standing in harm’s way in the first place.
In the first section of Neighbor Plots, I will argue that Robert Louis Stevenson’s
innovative Gothic fiction can be viewed as a testing ground for his central thesis in Lay Morals,
an unfinished treatise on ethics he drafted in the late 1870s, which has some surprising parallels
to mid- to late-twentieth-century philosophy and theory, and that of Emmanuel Levinas in
particular. In the first chapter, I will trace Stevenson’s early engagement with complex
philosophical questions and show how he enlists the Gothic to further interrogate the potential of
his ethical ideas by introducing two short stories, “Thrawn Janet” (1881) and “The Body
Snatcher” (1884). Then in the second chapter, “The Travelling Companion or, The Legend of
Two Brothers, Jekyll and Hyde”—an allusive title that I believe expresses the puzzle at the heart
of Stevenson’s famous novella—I will present the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), Stevenson’s most advanced neighbor plot in which he tests his ethical ideas at the very
limit.
In Shirley Jackson’s Gothic neighbor plots, the community endangers the potential of an
ethical relation to one’s neighbor from the very start. For this reason, I will introduce Jackson’s
Gothic project by reading the previously unpublished short story “The Man in the Woods”
5
(2014) through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1991), which will in
turn allow me to present an in-depth portrait of the exclusionary practices of an operative
community in a The Road Through the Wall (1948). Chapter four, “‘Somewhere between here
and there’: Neighboring Narratives in The Lottery,” which involves zooming in closer to observe
various characters struggling to maintain their tentative position within the communal small town
and city alike, will serve as a transition to my reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(1962), the story of two sisters who have the audacity to dwell in a radically alternative
community.
All the stories on which this dissertation focuses, and the ethical concerns of thinkers
like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray are tangled in a
nexus of what I call neighbor praxis. But because the neighbor and the question of our
responsibility to the neighbor are historically (and literarily) tied to the Bible, before I acquaint
the reader with what this ethical praxis entails, I will begin with an overview of these early
figurations of the neighbor and the meaning of neighbor-love that still inform the way we think
about the neighbor today. My aim here is to provide a theoretical context for literary neighbor
plots, and one that I will continue to elaborate throughout the sections that follow. To try to
account for the long and complicated history of neighbor ethics would require its own book-
length study.
The figure of the neighbor and our ethical responsibility to the neighbor (neighbor-love),
have long been sites of unneighborly dispute between Jewish and Christian scholars. At issue is
to what extent Jesus Christ’s teachings recorded in the New Testament depart from the original
Levitical injunction that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18), which is often
interpreted as restrictive to members of the Jewish community (Fagenblat 1257), and as just one
6
law among countless juridical, moral, religious, and symbolic rules and regulations, thus lacking
the prioritized position it has within Christian theology (Moyaert 171).
The primary reason that the Levitical commandment is thought to be limited to the
Jewish neighbor is because the Hebrew word re’a often, though not always, denotes a kinsman
or a friend—Robert Alter uses “fellow man” in his translation of The Five Books of Moses
(1996)—and does not connote any spatial proximity of “neighbor” despite the fact that the
Septuagint translates re’a into the Greek plesíon, which refers to someone nearby (Fagenblat
1257–258).
4
But, as Michael Fagenblat points out in “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and
Christian Ethics,” it is not surprising that the legal literature of the Torah, including Leviticus
19:18, has been traditionally understood as pertaining to members of the covenant community.
After all, the Torah inscribes the laws of a particular nation rather than a set of universal
guidelines, but these laws do not mean that Jews are legally obliged to love only each other:
This view of ancient Judaism as restrictive ironically restricts Jewish ethics to one verse and
neglects the full charter of Leviticus 19. The chapter goes on, in v. 34 (cf. Deut 10.19) to mandate:
“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien
as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” By using the
same love language . . . verse 34 equates the love prescribed to one’s fellow Israelite with love for
the stranger. (1259)
5

That said, when the commandment is repeated in the Gospel of Matthew, we seem to have a less
exclusive meaning of neighbor from the Greek plesíon. The injunction has also been promoted to
the second greatest commandment:
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of
them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the
greatest?” He [Jesus] said to him: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is

4
For more on the various (and sometimes contradictory) ways that re’a is used throughout the Torah, see
Michael Fagenblat’s “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics,” in The Jewish Annotated New
Testament (2011).
5
Fagenblat goes on to cite several other examples of Jewish ethics that “provide alternative avenues for
cultivating a ‘universalistic’ moral attitude” (1259).
7
like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets” (Matthew 22:34–40)
6

But this is not all; earlier in Matthew, Jesus makes a similar pronouncement about the golden
rule—“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the
prophets” (7.12)—and thus, the commandment to love your neighbor is not only a close second
to the greatest commandment, it is also linked to “the supreme moral principle that thoughtful
people will agree on” (Ricoeur, Figuring 293).
However, in The Golden Rule (1996), Jeffrey Wattles explains that it was not until the
second century B.C.E. that the golden rule flourished in Jewish literature, where it advanced
from a marginal position to one of the principal religious teachings (42). But once the golden
rule emerges in Jewish literature, it is used both to summarize the law and in a way that connects
back to the commandment to love your neighbor. For example, notice the similarities between
this Talmudic passage concerning Rabbi Hillel, who flourished between 30 B.C.E. and 10 C.E.,
and the two excerpts from the Gospel of Matthew cited above:
This conservative rabbi, renowned for his patience, was once approached by an importunate
prospective convert to Judaism who had been turned away by Shammai, the leader of the school
competing with that of Hillel.
On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him,
“Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.”
Thereupon he [Shammai] repulsed him with the builder’s square which was in his hand. When he
went before Hillel, he [Hillel] said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor:
that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereon; go and learn it.” (48, emphasis
added)
7

6
The Pharisees were a Jewish movement that followed Oral Torah (Mishnah and Talmud) and extended Jewish
practice in all areas of life; and the Saduccess were a Jewish movement that opposed the Pharisees in rejecting both
the Oral Torah and belief in resurrection (The Jewish Annotated New Testament 1503, 1508).
7
While one could argue that similar to the Levitical commandment, Hillel means neighbor in a limited sense
here, I think it is important to keep in mind that he is responding to a non-Jew here. Furthermore, this is only one of
several examples of the golden rule in Jewish literature of the period. For more, see Wattles’s The Golden Rule,
Chapter Four.
8
With just a single rule, Hillel summarizes the entire Torah, and although the commandment to
love God may be implied in Hillel’s negative formulation of the golden rule, he cites only the
obligation to the neighbor.
8

My point here is not to debate whether the primacy of a nonrestrictive neighbor-love and
its relation to the golden rule was developed first in Judaism or Christianity; rather, it is to show
that these ethical ideas are not exclusive to either. The concept of neighbor-love is, however,
certainly expanded upon in the New Testament, with a principal example being the parable of the
Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke.
9
When asked “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies with
a story about a Jew who was traveling the notoriously dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho
and “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half
dead.” Both a priest and a Levite failed to offer assistance when they passed by the dying man
but a Samaritan showed mercy and took care of him (Luke 10:29–37). Apart from the polemical
function of the parable, in which the good Samaritan is put in stark contrast with Jewish legalism
and tribalism, Jesus does not really answer “Who is my neighbor?”; instead, by putting the
neighbor in the subject position, Jesus answers what it means to be a neighbor (“neighbor”

8
In Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which was written during Nero’s reign (54–68 C.E.), we hear an echo of
Hillel: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law”
(13:8–10). Here, Paul goes a step further than Matthew’s Jesus by asserting that love for the other, or neighbor, is
the fulfilling of the law, which is often cited as a key statement of Christian supersessionism (“neighbor” DU).
9
The parable follows a passage that parallels Matthew 22:34-40. In Luke’s version, a lawyer—i.e. a scribe, an
expert in the law of Moses and likely affiliated with the Pharisees—asks Jesus what he must do to inherit the eternal
life. Jesus says to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”, to which the lawyer answered: “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor
as yourself.” And Jesus says to this man: “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:25–
28). The parable of the Good Samaritan thus begins when this same lawyer, wanting to justify himself, asked: “And
who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29).
9
DU).
10
Or, as Søren Kierkegaard explains in Works of Love (1847), “Christ does not speak about
recognizing one’s neighbour but about being a neighbour oneself, about proving oneself to be a
neighbour” (38).
11

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–49),
Christ says it is not enough to love your neighbor as yourself, you must love your enemies as
well, and you must not expect anything in return—at least not in this life:
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love
them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do
the same. If you lend to those from who you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even
sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend,
expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High;
for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (Luke
6:32–36)

Unlike the golden rule, the Levitical injunction to love your neighbor as yourself does not
necessarily imply reciprocity; but, it also declines to explicitly command an asymmetrical
obligation to one’s neighbor, let alone one’s enemy. How are we to reconcile such an extreme
version of the commandment without agreeing with Sigmund Freud—whom I will soon
discuss—that it is simply an impossible commandment to fulfill? Paul Ricoeur, who equates the
injunction to love your neighbor with the biblical iteration of the golden rule, interprets the logic
of superabundance as a corrective, rather than as a replacement, to the logic of equivalence

10
Fagenblat argues that contrary to many interpretations, “the parable neither redefines the term ‘neighbor’ nor
abolishes the distinction between Jew and Gentiles. Jews did not regard the Samaritans as Gentiles. There was
certainly long-standing enmity between Samaritans and Jews: the two nations claimed different locations for the
Temple, different versions of the Torah, and lines of priests” (1262). As Israelites with entrenched opposition to the
Jewish ways of understanding their shared traditions (1262–263), the Samaritans are similar to early Christians
(“neighbor” DU).
11
Kierkegaard explains that as opposed to “worldly wisdom,” which thinks that love is a relationship between
man and man, Christian love
is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term. However beautiful
the love-relationship has been between two or more people, however complete all their enjoyment
and all their bliss in mutual enjoyment and affection have been for them, even if all men have
praised this relationship—if God and the relationship to God have been left out, then, Christianly
understood, this has not been love but a mutual and enchanting illusion of love. For to love God is
to love oneself in truth; to help another human being to love God is to love another man; to be
helped by another human being to love God is to be loved. (112–13)

10
engendered in the golden rule (“I give so that you give”). In other words, the commandment to
love your enemies opens up the golden rule, and moves it away from the tendency to support
self-interest toward a welcoming attitude to the other:
Detached from the golden rule, the commandment to love one’s enemies is not ethical but
supraethical, as is the whole economy of the gift to which it belongs. If it is not to swerve over to
the nonmoral, or even to the immoral, the commandment to love must reinterpret the golden rule
and, in so doing, be it itself reinterpreted by this rule. (Ricoeur, Figuring 300–1)

Ricoeur also reminds the reader of the initial dissymmetry between the protagonists of the action
that presupposes the golden rule and the norm of reciprocity, an initial dissymmetry that is also
the occasion for violence, or “power exerted over one will by another will . . . the diminishment
or destruction of the power-to-do of others” (Ricoeur, Oneself 220). The potential for violence,
or to cause another to suffer, is the connection between the golden rule and the numerous
prohibitions that culminate in “You shall not kill”:
This sinister—though not exhaustive—enumeration of the figures of evil in the intersubjective
dimension established by solicitude has its counterpart in the series of prescriptions and
prohibitions stemming from the Golden Rule in accordance with the various compartments of
interaction: you shall not lie, you shall not steal, you shall not kill, you shall not torture. In each
case, morality replies to violence. And if the commandment cannot do otherwise than to take the
form of a prohibition, this is precisely because of evil: to all the figures of evil responds the no of
morality. Here, doubtless, resides the ultimate reason for which the negative form of prohibition is
inexpungible. (221)

Because the golden rule is concerned with the intersubjective aspect of action and underscores
that morality is coincident with the problem of violence, Ricoeur values this ethical formulation
over Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (Figuring, 294–95): “in the political philosophy of
natural rights, the other is seen as a potential assailant, someone who may interfere with my
rights. But here, the potential aggressor to whom the golden rule is addressed is me” (295).
12

Another reason that Ricoeur upholds the golden rule, and one that will help us transition into the

12
The categorical imperative states: “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time
will that it become a universal law.” And the second formulation, or the practical imperative, reads: “act that you use
humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely
as a means” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 34, 41).
11
realm of contemporary philosophy, is that Kant subordinates the relation between people to the
principle of autonomy, “which states in a monological way the rule for the universalization of
maxims cited above,” and therefore, “this criterion does not thematically imply a plurality of
subjects” (294).
13

Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are just two of the modern thinkers who engage with
the concept of neighbor-love. In Civilizations and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declares the
impossibility of the Levitical injunction to defend against our instinctual, self-destructive
aggressiveness that endangers communal life (111): “The commandment is impossible to fulfill;
such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. . . .
anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a
disadvantage vis-à-vis the person who disregards it” (109). As reasonable as Freud’s assessment
of modern civilization might be, there is little ambiguity when it comes to his pronouncement on
both the commandment to love your neighbor and ethics more generally. However, Jacques
Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s horror of the neighbor lends itself to a far less conclusive
interpretation of Gothic neighbor plots. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Lacan turns
to Freud’s unfinished Entwurf (1895), in which Freud posits that it is in relation to the
Nebenmensch, the fellow human-being, that we learn to cognize (1:331).
14
What interests Lacan
in Freud’s analysis of the “neighbor complex” is the aspect of the fellow human-being that Freud
says we cannot know—that which remains a Thing (331).
15
Lacan explains:
every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one’s
neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor.
But if that is the case, then it also dwells within me. And what is more of a neighbor to me than

13
For more on how the language of the categorical imperative eliminates the otherness at the root of diversity
see Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another (1992), pp. 223–24.
14
The specific section is translated as “Remembering and Judging” in a Project for a Scientific Psychology in
Volume I of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, pp. 331–32.
15
I am following Simon Critchley’s lead and referring to the “complex of the fellow human-being” as “the
neighbor complex” for brevity (Infinitely 65).
12
this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near? For as soon as I
go near it, as Civilization and Its Discontents makes clear, there rises up the unfathomable
agressivity from which I flee, that I turn against me, and which in the very place of the vanished
Law adds its weight to that which prevents me from crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the
Thing. (186)

Nebenmensch als Ding is the fundamental evil that dwells within this neighbor and that also
dwells within me.
16

What interests Lacan is “the idea of the Thingliness of the other person as something
alien to me but which is located at the core of my subjectivity. . . the excluded interior, where I
discover that what is most interior to my interiority is exterior to me, it is ‘something strange to
me, although it is at the heart of me’” (Critchley 65). Unlike Freud, who concludes that the
Nebenmensch complex is resolved through the activity of judgment, which reduces the other to
the same (Critchley, Ethics 210), Lacan posits that a Thingly secrecy remains, and he describes it
in terms similar to Levinas’s alterity—“there is something about the other person, a dimension of
separateness . . . that escapes my comprehension. That which exceeds the bounds of my
knowledge demands acknowledgement” (Infinitely 66). But while there may be a homology
between ethical subjectivity in Lacan and Levinas (Ethics 207), the religioethical register of
Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately more helpful for unpacking certain ideas in Stevenson’s
ethical treatise.
17
Moreover, although Levinasian philosophy is largely incommensurable with

16
In “The Gothic and The Thing” (2009), Gary Farnell called for a new theory of the Gothic through this
particular Lacanian framework, stating that the extimacy of the Thing would help us “grasp such externalities as
haunted spaces and decaying properties with absences at their hearts, and the other being’s or the immediate
subject’s deepest and most imperceptible subjectivity, all of these familiar topoi of countless Gothic fictions” (114–
5). Wyatt Bonikowski recently responded to Farnell’s call with “‘Only One Antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the
Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson” (2013), which I briefly introduce in my discussion of “The
Daemon Lover” (1949). Although I am using Lacan’s Nebenmensch als Ding as a segue to Levinas and will not be
featuring Lacanian theory in my literary analysis, I do believe that an analysis of a Gothic text through the
Nebenmensch als Ding has the potential to fall outside a traditional psychoanalytic interpretation.
17
Without trying to align too closely Lacan and Levinas, Critchley’s organizing claim about Lacanian and
Levinasian ethics is that “the structure of the Lacanian ethical subject organized around das Ding—as the prehistoric
other that it is impossible to forget, as something strange or entfremdet that is at the heart of me (étranger à moi tout
en étant au cœur de ce moi)—has the same structure as the Levinasian ethical subject that I sought to elucidate with
the concept of trauma and which Levinas tries to capture with various formulae, such as ‘the other in the same’, and
which I described above as ‘the inside of the inside that is outside’” (Ethics 207).
13
the discourse of literary criticism (Robbins xx), as Derrida suggests in Adieu to Levinas (1997), it
is integral to any discussion where there is a question of the responsibility before the other.
18

Levinasian ethics seeks a non-allergic relation with alterity in order to resist totalizing
and reductive philosophical systems that seek to identify, and therefore possess power over,
alterity (Totality 47). He conceives of an ethical relationship in which the face of the other
primordially expresses you shall not commit murder: “the epiphany of the face brings forth the
possibility of gauging the infinity of the temptation to murder, not only as a temptation to total
destruction, but also as the purely ethical impossibility of this temptation and attempt” (199). In
his alternative translation of the Levitical commandment, Levinas represents this subjectivity that
is initiated by being-for-the-other: “Love your neighbor; this work is like yourself; love your
neighbor; he is yourself; it is this love of the neighbor which is yourself” (qtd. in Ferreira 90,
emphasis added).
19

It is impossible to provide a brief overview of Levinas’s ethics that adequately accounts
for Levinas’s rigorous philosophy, let alone his unique conceptual and lexical configurations
(Derrida, Adieu 56).
20
But what I can do is stress the importance of two related ideas; the first,

18
In Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (1999), Robbins explains that literary criticism, “whether it is
conceived as the determination of a work’s meaning or as an analysis of formal structures, would be derivative upon
Levinas’s more originary question of the ethical, part of what Heidegger calls a regional ontology. Hence Levinas’s
philosophy cannot function as an extrinsic approach to the literary work of art, that is, it cannot give rise to an
application. Of course, much will depend on what one means by literary criticism. If literary criticism is conceived
as a more originary questioning of the nature and the conditions of literature and poetic experience, as in the case of
Maurice Blanchot, or as a study of the operations of tropes and figures within what Paul de Man calls the rhetorical
dimension of language, this incommensurability may prove to be only apparent. Finally, an approach to the question
of Levinas and literature has to take into account that Levinas speaks rather rarely about the literary, and that when
he does it is almost always in dismissive terms . . . . Levinas’s theoretical discourse on the aesthetic most often
asserts an unbridgeable chasm between art and ethics” (xx–xi).
19
Levinas found the “as yourself” in the commandment a stumbling block. For a comparative analysis of
Kierkegaard and Levinas’s interpretation of the Levitical injunction, see M. Jamie Ferreira’s essay “Kierkegaard and
Levinas on Four Elements of the Biblical Love Commandment,” in Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and
Religion (2008).
20
See Derrida’s Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas for a discussion of Levinas’s new conceptual and lexical
configurations, particularly the various interrelated terms that connect to the formula “The subject is hostage,” on
pp. 55–57.
14
which I touched upon above, is that a subject’s responsibility puts the subjectivity of the subject
in question (56), and the second is that of radical alterity. Levinas writes: “The absolutely other
is the Other. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a
plural of the ‘I.’ I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept” (Totality 39). Jean-Luc
Nancy also stresses plurality, and just as Levinas resists the idea that individuals are of a
common concept, Nancy interrupts the community of common being, or the operative
community. In The Inoperative Community (1991), which I will discuss further in the second
section of this dissertation, Nancy writes that we must instead understand community as being-
in-common:
Community is what takes place always through others and for others. It is not the space of the
egos—subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal—but of the I’s, who are always others
(or else are nothing). If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the
true community of I’s that are not egos. It is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a
higher We. It is the community of others. . . . Community therefore occupies a singular place: it
assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in
the form of a subject. In a certain sense community acknowledges and inscribes—this is its
peculiar gesture—the impossibility of community. (15)

Nancy suggests that it is through literature that the community acknowledges and inscribes its
impossibility. And if, as Maurice Blanchot posits, it is “the strangeness of what couldn’t be
common” that grounds this community (qtd. in “The Confronted Community” 30), what could
be more suitable to expose this strangeness than the Gothic?
21

21
In “The Confronted Community” (2009), Nancy offers a belated response to Maurice Blanchot’s The
Unavowable Community (1983), which was written in reply to “The Inoperative Community” the article that would
be expanded into Nancy’s book. Here is the final passage: “I am rereading Blanchot’s text now: ‘[T]he strangeness
of what couldn’t be common is what grounds this community—forever provisional always already deserted.’ This
strangeness is not a mystery, nor is it a negativity (death is not present here as negativity but as the effectivity of
strangeness). This strangeness is the affirmation of naked confidence, of confiding nakedness—exposed, exhibited,
fragile, uncertain, but also, precisely, exposed, shown, manifested, in its disconcerting and troubling strangeness, the
strangeness of the most ordinary encounter as much as of the most unavowable bond” (30).
15
Chapter One: Plotting the Neighbor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Early Writing
The Caring Infidel
In “Legends,” an essay collected in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878), Robert Louis
Stevenson begins with the following conjecture: “The character of a place is often most perfectly
expressed in its associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true
romantic quality, and become an undying property of their scene” (59).
1
To a man like Sir Walter
Scott, a particular locale seems to contain its own legend, ready made, which Scott merely has to
call forth (59); but, Stevenson explains, “The common run of mankind have, from generation to
generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of Scott . . . where he created new things, they
only forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition
becomes a work of art” (60). In order to show that Edinburgh’s legends are “tales singularly
apposite and characteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature in
that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror” (60), Stevenson enlists several
legends that have been preserved in the collective memory of his native city, which he describes
in the introductory essay as “preeminently Gothic” (6)—and, I should add, such remarks won
Stevenson little favor with his reviewers.
Stevenson begins his virtual tour by directing the reader’s attention to two legendary
historical true crimes from the first half of the nineteenth century: “Here, it is the tale of Begbie
the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the
crowded High Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs and

1
“Legends” was first published in January 1878 in The Portfolio, as an article in a seven-month installment that
comprised “Notes on Edinburgh.” In mid-December of the same year, just a month after Stevenson’s twenty-eighth
birthday, the installment was published in book form as Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, which contained three
additional chapters (Swearingen, The Prose Writings 32). I refer to “Legends” as an essay rather than a chapter
because it can be read independently.
16
violated graves, and the resurrection-men smother their victims with their knees” (62).
2
He then
brings us back to the late eighteenth century by invoking the memory of Deacon Brodie, the
“redoubtable Edinburgh burglar” who for eighteen years successfully maintained a reputation as
“a great man . . . well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker” (62), until
his dramatic denouement involving a great robbery, an escape, an apprehension, and “a last step
into the air off his own greatly-improved gallows drop” (65).
3

Next, we descend further into the past with two seventeenth-century legends. Stevenson
recalls the period of the great plagues, “and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
memory of man” (66). For two generations these houses stood empty in the Old Town; for
within, it was supposed that “the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow forth and
spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door neighbor for superstitious
citizens!” (66–67). Stevenson then invokes the “unholy memory” of Major Thomas Weir, a
former lieutenant who lived with his sister in an odor of sour piety. Known as Angelical Thomas
and the Bowhead Saint, Weir was widely respected as a godly man with a rare gift of
supplication (67), but at the age of seventy, he sent shockwaves around old Edinburgh with a
confession in which he revealed himself to be an artist of dissimulation and hypocrisy (Sinclair
iii). Weir was tried and found guilty of wizardry, incest, and bestiality—to name just a few of the
charges against him—and the unrepentant Bowhead Saint was burned at the stake with his
infamous staff (Sinclair i–xix). Stevenson thinks it suitable that Weir’s legend, “the outcome and

2
Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” (1884) concerns the serial West Port murders of Burke and Hare
(1828–1829).
3
Stevenson’s childhood bedroom on Heriot Row was actually furnished with a cabinet built by Brodie and this
clearly made an impression: when Stevenson was nineteen years old, he drafted the earliest version of Deacon
Brodie, or The Double Life (1880), a melodrama that he began rewriting with W.E. Henley in October of 1878,
directly after finishing Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes and sending it off to the publisher (Swearingen, The Prose
Writings 32–37). Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, spoke of the influence that Deacon Brodie had on Stevenson’s famous
novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (Dury, “Crossing the Bounds” 237).
17
fine flower of dark and vehement religion,” would emerge from this superstitious city—“at least
the facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of myths” (68).
4

For his final example, Stevenson turns to the legend of the two maiden sisters—a legend,
he fears, “in the most discreditable meaning of the term,” or perhaps something worse, “a mere
yesterday’s fiction” (69). Until now, Stevenson has guided us backward in time with historical
legends, but here he presents a narrative that might more accurately be described as a fable—
psychological or religious (or both)—and which appears to be historical only in the sense that it
almost certainly derives from Alexander Leighton’s “The Story of the Chalk Line,” within
Romances of the Old Town in Edinburgh (1867).
5
Rather than being concerned with murderers
and rogues—or a deadly epidemic—this story centers on two devout, bible-reading women; but
despite its wholesome exterior, Stevenson is correct that “it is a story of some vitality” (69).
Therefore, in order to best represent this Puritanic horror, it is necessary to quote at length:
This pair inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been double-bedded; and it
may have had some dimensions: but when all is said, it was a single room. Here our two
spinsters fell out—on some point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly
that there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that day forward.
You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether from lack of means, or the
Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep house together where they were. A chalk
line drawn upon the floor separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the
fireplace, so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating the
territory of the other. So, for years, they coexisted in a hateful silence; their meals, their

4
Critics also cite Weir as a source of inspiration for Dr. Jekyll, and I imagine Stevenson had Weir in mind when
he chose Henry Jekyll’s staff as the murder weapon. Above, I reference George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World
Discovered (1685) because although Stevenson does not cite the demonologist, he quotes him directly in the essay.
Stevenson uses Satan’s Invisible World elsewhere in his fiction, including “Thrawn Janet” (1881).
5
Alexander Leighton was a writer and editor, best known for his work on Wilson’s Tales of the Borders (1857,
1869). In “The Story of the Chalk Line,” the narrator makes allusions to real-life persons and places—allusions that
allow the reader to discern that the story is set in the late eighteenth century—but there is no evidence of the
historical reality of the two sisters. Furthermore, Leighton introduces the story in the familiar style of (what we now
refer to as) an urban legend: “For the truth of the story I am about to relate I have the word of a godly minister of the
Church of Scotland, whose father had been in the house in Burnet’s Close, and had seen the two females and
examined ‘the chalk line’ in the middle of the floor. I do not say this to conciliate your belief; for perhaps if this
were my object, I should be nearer the attainment of it by asserting, as Mr. Thackeray used to do when he wanted his
readers to believe in him, that there is not a word of truth in the whole affair” (299).
William Roughead suggests that the supernatural twist at the end of “The Body Snatcher” was inspired by
urban legends that Leighton recorded in his book about the Westport Murders, The Court of Cacus; or, the story of
Burke and Hare (1861).
18
ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the
dark watches, each could hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look
down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is a
canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture—he had a Puritanic vein,
which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror; he could have shown them to
us in their sicknesses at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or
praying aloud for each other’s penitence with marrowy emphasis . . . . (69–71)

Despite their close proximity, or, perhaps, because of it, the sisters simply cannot
acknowledge their nearness; instead, they each cling to their fear of difference without seeing
that their mutual enmity makes them painfully alike. And here Stevenson announces the full
implication of this story: Edinburgh is a city of churches, and
[t]here is but a street between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and
yet there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other’s growth in
grace. It would be well if there were no more than two; but the sects in Scotland form a
large family of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of
many private homes. (72)

Stevenson concludes “Legends” with what quickly becomes a polemic against the Scottish
ecclesiastical tradition and its distinctively Manichean Calvinist theology that has persisted since
the Reformation.
6
The fable of the unsisterly sisters and their gratuitous strife is not simply a
metaphor for the unsisterly family of Scottish churches, in which each minor discrepancy has the
potential to create yet another schism, but, it is the legend of an unneighborly community:
Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath of
bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies,
calling on every separate conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue,
against “right-hand extremes and left-hand defections.” Surely there are few worse

6
In Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002), Philip Benedict explains that the
Scottish Reformation, which was loosely based on Calvinism that spread from the continent and most notably
influenced in Scotland by John Knox in the second half of the sixteenth century, was distinctive from other
Reformed confessions from the very start “in the extent to which it depicts, with apocalyptic overtones, the church
of Christ locked in an ongoing struggle against Satan” (162).
19
extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable defections than this
disloyalty to Christian love. (71–74)
7

In “Legends,” Stevenson uses popular cultural narratives (legends) as a navigational key
(legend) to the Scottish collective consciousness, claiming that they characterize the very
constitution of built nature. But, when he introduces the Puritanic horror of the two sisters, and
we seem to have arrived at some originary duality, it turns out that their room is bisected by
merely a chalk line, albeit a thickly drawn one. While the two sisters may signify two strands of
non-unitary consciousness, the dividing line between them is not intrinsic—maybe this is what
he means by built nature—and yet, it has given rise to a multitude of incongruous orthodoxies,
which Stevenson experienced firsthand.
8
Perhaps the reason that Stevenson does not prepare the
reader for a critique of Calvinist theology—nor the polarizing affects of an especially absolutist
ideology in general—is to catch the reader off guard, much as he himself was when Stevenson
told his parents he was agnostic in the early 1870s, and a thick chalk line was drawn right
through the Stevenson’s family home that left Stevenson grief-stricken. In 1873, Stevenson
wrote of the conflict in a letter to his friend Charles Baxter:
If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it in my heart to retract; but it is too late;
and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than Hell

7
With “Right-hand extremes and left-hand defections,” Stevenson identifies the seventeenth-century
Covenanters as exceptional for their moral absolutism. This phrase is often employed by Patrick Walker (Mehew
312), a Covenanting writer best known for his biographies of religious martyrs, such as Alexander Peden and John
Semple, which are compiled in Biographia Presbyteriana (1827). Stevenson’s lifelong interest in Covenanting
history, evident in stories such as “Thrawn Janet” (1881)—Reverend Soulis is inspired by Walker’s portraits of the
Covenanting ministers—was first kindled by his Calvinist nanny, Alison Cunningham, who had a penchant for
bloody tales of religious martyrdom (Norquay 31). In the posthumously published “Memoirs of Himself,” the
majority of which was written in 1880, Stevenson shares some memories of his “Covenanting childhood”: “I would
not only lie awake to weep for Jesus, which I have done many a time, but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest
I was not accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. I remember repeatedly . . . waking from a dream
of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body
convulsed with agony. It was not a pleasant subject. I piped and sniveled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had
been talked into me. I would say nothing without adding ‘If I am spared,’ as though to disarm fate by a show of
submission; and some of this feeling still remains upon me in my thirtieth year” (qtd. in Harman 23–24).
8
Dr. Jekyll intriguingly echoes this movement (and language) when he first asserts that “man is not truly one
but truly two”—“It was the curse of mankind . . . that in the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins
should be continuously struggling”—but also hazards the guess “that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity
of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (59). I will return to this idea in the following chapter.
20
upon my father; but can I help it? They don’t see either that my game is not a light-
hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as
they do, only generally in the inverse ration: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in
what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points
until I acquire further information. I do not think I am thus justly to be called a “horrible
atheist”; and I confess I cannot exactly swallow my father’s purpose of praying down
continuous afflictions on my head. . . . Oh Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just
damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in
the world. (qtd. in Mehew 313, emphasis added)

Fortunately, Stevenson and his parents learned to step over the chalk line and their affectionate
relationship was restored (Mehew 313), but the experience left a deep impact on him, and it
fueled his concern for developing a secular ethics outside the rigid morality of his parents’ strict
Presbyterianism, on the one hand, and the dangerously hierarchical models espoused by various
late-Victorian social and scientific discourses, on the other.
“Legends” is a peculiar piece of prose writing, and to the best of my knowledge, there is
no critical scholarship on this particular essay, and not much on Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes
more generally. The latter received few reviews, and as I hinted at earlier, most were
unfavorable; Stevenson’s sketch of his native city was deemed offensive, with one anonymous
reviewer noting Stevenson’s gift of style, but lamenting his decision to play the disinterested
flaneur in his native city (Maixner 60–61).
9
However, while “Legends” certainly has its flaws, it
also reads like an early blueprint for a selection of texts I identify as Stevenson’s Gothic
neighbor plots. The essay provides both a brief introduction to many of the popular legends and
themes that he will revisit in “Thrawn Janet” (1881), “The Body Snatcher” (1884), and The

9
In Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (2005), Claire Harman explains that
Stevenson had just returned home from Paris, where he had been spending time with his future wife, Fanny
Osborne, and he worked on the series of articles while “moping in his study” at his parents’ home in Edinburgh
(Harman 155). What I find interesting is that the impersonal tone is a complete reversal from the earnest and
heartfelt “Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family” (1877), an autobiographical epistolary tale that Stevenson had
begun the previous year, and within which Stevenson revisits some of the painful arguments he had with his parents
over the subject of religion. At one point, Stevenson’s fictional mouthpiece, William Rutherford writes, “It is not
possible that anyone should be so anxious to do right as I am and not find a sufficient guide” (100). In his Gothic,
Stevenson found the right balance between the personal and not-ironic-enough tone of the “Edifying Letters,” on the
one hand, and the impersonal and somewhat sardonic tone of “Legends,” on the other.
21
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and an early indication of Stevenson’s subtle but
tireless engagement with a variety of historical and contemporary subjects, including literary folk
narratives, demonology, historical true crime, Christian theology, Scottish Covenanting history,
evolutionary discourse, and more.
10
But most significantly, “Legends” introduces us to the
unsisterly sisters, who link Stevenson’s Gothic doubles and oft-cited interest in non-unitary
consciousness to the question of neighbor-love.
Following the publication of Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, Stevenson drafted Lay
Morals, an unfinished treatise on ethics that is addressed to young men fretting at the bars of life
because there are no adequate guides (“Introductory” 167–8).
11
Throughout the three sections,
Stevenson counters traditional morality and develops an ethical praxis toward an other rooted in
the shadowy figure of “the nearer neighbor within”—(a.k.a. inner-voice, inherited voice, central

10
In Narrating Scotland (2005), Barry Menikoff explains that Stevenson was deeply influenced by Scottish
history, religion, literature, and law: “The novelist was engaged in a dialogue with his ancestors, a panoply of
Scottish writers—advocates and legal historians, missionaries and travel writers, church priests with their eyes on
the next world, and careful folklorists with their ears pitched to the odd stories of this one. In short, Stevenson
silently coopted all the neglected and forgotten scholars and labored in obscurity to record both the blood and the
glory of their people’s lives. If he failed to credit them in print, he immortalized them in art” (4).
11
A note on the text: there seems to be at least three drafts of Lay Morals, with only one including the
Introductory section, which is printed together with “Lay Morals” and two other essays—“On Morality” and “The
Ethics of Crime”—in vol. 24 of the Vailima edition. While all these texts are thematically linked, the relationship
between them is contested and the dates of composition remain uncertain, with the near exception of “Lay
Morals”—the longest and most significant of the three—which critics generally agree was drafted in 1879 and
worked on again in 1883 (Swearingen, The Prose Writing 41). The editors of Autograph Letters, Original
Manuscripts (1914), believe that “On Morality” and “The Ethics of Crime” were written around 1876, at a time
“when Stevenson was troubled with the religious side of life, and they show his inner thoughts on the great
questions of morality, crime, and duty to his fellow man . . . these essays would seem to be missing parts of ‘Lay
Morals’” (44). But Swearingen provides no date for “On Morality” (195), and explains that references to the Irish
Secretary Arthur Balfour date “The Ethics of Crime” no earlier than 1887 (198). While it seems possible that
Stevenson might have added this reference to Balfour at a later date, the reason I did not mention “The Ethics on
Crime” above is because, apart from the fact that Swearingen is one of the foremost authorities on Stevenson’s
archive, the essay does have a slightly different style and tone.
22
self, soul, conscience, and so on)—and what emerges is an ethics that adumbrates certain strands
in twentieth-century philosophy, most notably Levinas’s deontological phenomenology.
12

In “On Morality,” Stevenson presents a brief history of morality, and, although he offers
an evolutionary perspective, he resists the idea of a “progressive civilization” (267); in fact, he
derides the fantasy that the civilizing process is teleological and that morality will simply take
care of itself:
Superstition has changed place; he [civilized man] no longer believes in the sanctity of
any particular custom, but he has made a new idol in the place of that. He conceives of
morals as being only partly customary, and that part the worse. He deludes himself with a
fairy tale that when the body of law and custom shall be dead, the soul of morality will be
disengaged and made perfect; that a man may plough up his orchard, and come round
again next week and enjoy the shade and gather apples.
This singular notion, it is well to brush away. There is no eternal Thou Shalt Not
inscribed upon man’s nature; only rumours in the market-place varying from age to age,
praising to-morrow what they yesterday condemned. There is no Arabian tale so fantastic
as the history of right and wrong and perhaps no action conceivable that has not (at one
time or other) figured under both categories. If there be anything we can condemn (to-day
and in our race) without an afterthought or hesitation, it is the wanton infliction of
suffering. Yet it was no degraded race that recognized elaborate cruelty for a duty. (268)

Stevenson states unambiguously that he seeks an ethics in which the only obligation is to
recognize and condemn wanton suffering and cruelty, but even if we put the law to the side—“A
magistrate cannot tell whether you love your neighbour as yourself” (“Lay Morals” 195)—
individuals are still caught between two guides, and both are within. Stevenson continues:
Man stands between his two guides the authoritative choice in his own bosom, the
external consent or compromise of his age and nation, both inherited, both stark
irrational, both (if we reflect upon it) sacred. If he cross his conscience, certain intimate
dishonour, possible personal degradation: if he defy the sense of his contemporaries,
certain outward disrepute and possible public hurt. And if the public hurt is to be
considered the more tenderly, yet we must not minimize the disrepute. It is good to bear
unpopularity; but the sense that suffers is the probable root of all our virtues. And the man
who has no sensitive need of public countenance, the man who offends his neighbours

12
In the Introductory passage, Stevenson acknowledges that his undertaking will be “not only difficult, but
responsible”; he adds, however, “the responsibility of the writer discharges not a jot of the responsibility of him who
reads. If you go wrong and are guilty of cruel and unmanly acts, and come, friendless and hating yourself, to the end
of a detestable career, the reading of this book will be no more than a pretext for cowards to allege. ‘There was a
nearer neighbour within who was incessantly telling you how you should behave; but you waited for the neighbour
from without to tell you of some false, easier way’” (68).
23
without pain, is of the blood of criminals. And there is nothing (it is worth while to
observe) on which the New Testament blows so directly hot and cold as on this difficulty.
Christ with his sweeping “Let the dead bury their dead,” Paul with his timid concern for
the weak brother. (273, emphasis added)
13

Because of the conflicting authoritative voices within consciousness, Stevenson presents
a theory of consciousness that interrupts the autonomous subject and acknowledges plurality and
alterity:
It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and autonomous empire;
but that in the same body with him there dwell other powers tributary but independent. . .
. This something, which is the man, is a permanence which abides through the
vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now triumphant, now unconscious of itself
in the immediate distress of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all. So, to the
man, his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of the senses, like
a revolving Pharos in the night. It is forgotten; it is hid, it seems, forever; and yet in the
next calm hour he shall behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes
and storm. . . .
This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by
which the individual exists and must order his conduct, is something special to himself
and not common to the race. (“Lay Morals” 202–04)

Though Stevenson argues that man is not a common concept, he nonetheless attempts to
formulate an ethical imperative—“What is right is that for which a man’s central self is ever
ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central self discards or
rejects as incompatible with the fixed design of righteousness” (205)—but immediately, he
acknowledges the inadequacy of ethical language (“right,” “wrong,” “fixed design of
righteousness,” and so on) precisely because man is not a common concept, or a plural “I,” to
borrow a phrase from Levinas (Totality 39). Stevenson says:
That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each man by himself, but can
never be rigorously set forth in language, and never, above all, imposed upon another.
The conscience has, then, a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for
the most part illuminates none but its possessor. When many people perceive the same or
any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol; and hence we have such words as
tree, star, love, honour, or death; hence also we have this word right, which, like the

13
While the New Testament may blow hot and cold, Stevenson gestures toward a non-restrictive neighbor-love
in “Lay Morals” during his critique of the Ten Commandments. He proclaims Thou Shalt Not Steal is broken by any
individual, himself included, who has filched his fellow’s birthright and profited from an unjust world where so
many are hindered by social inequality and adversity (188).
24
others, we all understand, most of us understand differently, and none can express
succinctly otherwise.
14

However, Stevenson is a committed guide and he nonetheless suggests a practice in which we
might learn to recognize the variables of our consciousness and catch a glimpse our veiled
prophet:
Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our
own superior thoughts. For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that a man,
through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the
intimacy is at times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy. As we said
before, his inner self or soul appears to him by successive revelations, and is frequently
obscured. It is from a study of these alternations that we can alone hope to discover, even
dimly, what seems right and what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself. (205–
06)
15

What casts a light, from the inside, on our veiled prophet?
Stevenson resists the concept of an autonomous subject and instead acknowledges alterity
within every one of us; he “does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the
ethical relation in general,” as Derrida said of Levinas (Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”
111). Stevenson argues that conscience has an incommunicable vision, like that of eyes, which
we must engage to catch a glimpse of our neighbor within. The similarity between Stevenson’s
ideas and those of Levinas (and related thinkers) suggests that we might view Stevenson’s

14
Stevenson anticipates Ludwig Wittgenstein in “A Lecture on Ethics” (1929), who explains that “a certain
characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions” because judgment of ethical
or religious values is relative, not absolute. But though “the tendency of all men who ever tried to run against the
boundaries of language” is hopeless, and though ethics can be no science, Wittgenstein concludes that “it is a
document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my
life ridicule it” (Philosophical Occasions 42–44).
15
Stevenson’s use of the term “veiled prophet” to describe his inner-self or soul is an allusion to Thomas
Moore’s “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” (1817). In 1886, he uses a similar phrase, “veiled mistress,” to refer to
his relationship to ethics in a letter to Edward Purcell, who had remarked in his review of Jekyll and Hyde that
Stevenson’s “puzzling enigmatic ethics, whether they be individual, or whether they are a true reflection of a present
transitional state of society, are the real hindrance to his aims of producing a great romance worthy of his genius.” In
his response to Purcell, Stevenson states: “What you say about the confusion of my ethics, I own to be all too true. It
is, as you say, where I fall, and fall almost consciously. I have the old Scotch Presbyterian preoccupation about these
problems; itself morbid; I have alongside of that a second, perhaps more—possibly less—morbid element—the
dazzled incapacity to choose, of an age of transition. The categorical imperative is always with me, but utters dark
oracles. This is a ground almost of pity. The Scotch side came out plain in Dr. Jekyll; the XIXth century side
probably baffled me even there, and most other places baffles me entirely. Ethics are my veiled mistress; I love
them, but I know not what they are. Is this my fault? Partly, of course, it is; because I love my sins like other people.
Partly my merit, because I do not take, and rest contented in, the first subterfuge” (5:212–13).
25
Gothic neighbor plots, which happen to underline the significance of face-to-face encounter,
through a deconstructionist lens. But my approach to Stevenson’s Gothic neighbor plots also
entails that we view him as a liberal ironist, with liberal referring to people who think that
cruelty is the worst thing we do, and ironist, to those who face up to the contingency of their
most central beliefs (Rorty xv, 74).
16
With each successive neighbor plot, Stevenson introduces
an increasingly isolated and violently self-serving protagonist—none so threatening to his
neighbors as Dr. Jekyll, the poignantly inward-looking gentleman—and ultimately, Stevenson’s
fiction suggests that ethical subjectivity can only be initiated by looking out.
If, as I intimated earlier, “Legends” can be viewed as an early indication of Stevenson’s
eventual turn to the Gothic as a place to explore the unneighborly community, then perhaps he
found the necessary motivation to face up to the contingency of his ethical beliefs in a letter that
he wrote to his mother on December 26, 1880. Stevenson writes:
I wonder if you or my father ever thought of the obscurities that lie upon human duty
from the negative form in which the Ten Commandments are stated, or of how Christ was
so continually substituting affirmations. “Thou shalt not” is but an example; “Thou shalt”
is the law of God. It was this that seems meant in the phrase that “not one jot nor tittle of
the law should pass.” But what led me to the remark is this: A kind of black, angry look
goes with that statement of the law of negatives. “To love one’s neighbour as oneself” is
certainly much harder, but states life so much more actively, gladly, and kindly, that you
begin to see some pleasure in it; and till you can see pleasure in these hard choices and
bitter necessities, where is there any Good News to men? It is much more important to do
right than not to do wrong; further, the one is possible, the other has always been and will
ever be impossible . . . . Faith is, not to believe the Bible, but to believe in God; if you

16
In an effort to circumvent critical debates about Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy and his somewhat fraught
relationship with deconstruction, I refer the reader to Simon Critchley’s deft handling of this issue in Ethics—
Politics—Subjectivity (1999). However, I will say this: Rorty’s reading of Nabokov on cruelty in Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity (1989), not only made me more attentive of moments of incuriosity in Jekyll and Hyde, but it
also assured me of Lolita’s indebtedness to the novella. Of course, Nabokov was a fan of Jekyll and Hyde and
includes an analysis of it in his Lectures on Literature (1980), which is much to his credit considering Stevenson’s
exclusion from the great tradition of the novel—as determined by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948)—
which Ian Duncan discusses in “Stevenson and Fiction” (2010).
26
believe in God (or, for it’s the same thing, have that assurance you speak about) where is
there any more room for terror? (Letters 3:149–50)
17

Where is there any more room for terror? It is as if that summer, while he and his wife Fanny
were staying in the Highland burgh of Pitlochry, Stevenson wrote “Thrawn Janet” and “The
Body Snatcher” in response to this very question.
“Thrawn Janet”

“Thrawn Janet” is the text in which Stevenson first achieves the Puritanical horror he
admired in Hawthorne, and indicates that, like Scott, he can summon forth a legend suitable to
his surroundings, even though he sets the story in a fictional moorland village in the early
eighteenth century. The narrative, which concerns a young minister’s gesture of neighborly
hospitality to an accused witch and the Gothic confrontation that follows, reveals that the terror
of loving a neighbor is being a neighbor oneself.
The frame narrative is set in 1762 and begins with a portrait of the protagonist, Reverend
Soulis, as an older man:
The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in
the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the
last years of his life, without any relative or servant or any human company, in the small
and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features,
his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on

17
In “A Christmas Sermon” (1888), Stevenson revisits many of the ideas he expresses in his day-after-
Christmas letter to his mother: “How far is he [man] to make his neighbour happy? . . . And how far, on the other
side, is he bound to be his brother’s keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far must he resent evil? The
difficulty is that we have little guidance: Christ’s sayings on the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and
(the most of them) hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune,
we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to
the man who has taken our cloak. But when another’s face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us
best” (209, emphasis added).
27
the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to
the terrors of eternity. (410)
18

The minister has an especially dreadful effect on the young folks preparing for the season of the
Holy Communion, and every year, on the first Sunday after August 17, Reverend Soulis delivers
a sermon on the First Epistle of Peter, verse eight, “The devil is a roaring lion,” in which “he was
accustomed to surpass himself both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his
bearing in the pulpit” (410). But the minister inspires fear in his parishioners regardless of the
season and whether or not he is in the pulpit; since very early in his ministry, townsfolk have
avoided passing by the uncanny neighborhood of Mr. Soulis’s manse after dusk (410). The
house, which lies between the high road and the water of Dule, and half a mile from the kirktown
of Balweary, opens onto a causeway path that connects the high road to the wooded area that
bordered on the stream (411). Among the young parishioners, this strip of causeway has become
infamous: “The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy
of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more
daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to ‘follow my leader’ across the legendary spot”
(411).
19

The narrator explains that although the atmosphere of terror that surrounds a man “of
spotless character and orthodoxy” is a cause of wonder and a subject for inquiry among the few
strangers who happen to find themselves in this outlying region—the unnamed speaker is

18
For the rare reader who is well learned in Scottish history of the early modern period, the first lines might
exhibit that personal and place names in “Thrawn Janet” had been “chosen with a precisian’s pain,” as Coleman O.
Parsons points out (551). The minister’s name recalls Lord William Soulis, a wizard of “pernicious description”
(Law xvi), and, Lord Soulis is often associated with another famous enchanter, Sir Michael Scott of Balweary.
Stevenson probably also had Margaret Aiken (or Aitken) in mind, as she was the “great witch of Balwery [sic]
turned universal informer,” in the late sixteenth century (Parsons 552). Parsons also informs us that “the vale and the
water of Dule, the Perthshire village and parish of Dull were not far from Pitlochry, where ‘Thrawn Janet’ was
written, but the spelling more definitely warrants a Bunyanesque interpretation, grief (c.f. archaic dole)” (552).
19
Here, Stevenson directly echoes the section in “Legends” concerned with the great plagues and the bogeyish
old houses that stood dark and empty for two generations—“the boldest schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole
and made off” (66–67).
28
presumably one such stranger—many of the people in the community are ignorant of the
mysterious events that occurred in the first year of Reverend Soulis’s ministry, and the few who
do remember are reticent (411). But now and again, the narrator continues, “one of the older folk
would warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the minister’s strange
looks and solitary life,” and with this, the narrative is taken over by one of the older locals, and
the reader is transported back another fifty years (411).
The story about the Reverend Soulis in 1712 is relayed in a strong Scots dialect, which
intensifies the temporal distance between the reader and the narrative. And yet, this distance is
immediately complicated when the local narrator describes the young Mr. Soulis; in contrast to
the bleak-faced older man who seems to have stepped off the page of a seventeenth-century
Covenanting history, this Reverend Soulis is a college-educated “callant,” or young man, “fu’ o’
book learnin’ and grand at the exposition” (411), a description that aligns Soulis’s intellectualism
with the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment, and thus, situates him as a link between the past
and the present. Soulis occupies a similar position within the devout Protestant village; whereas
the younger folks “were greatly taken wi’ his gifts and his gab,” the “auld, concerned, serious
men and women were moved even to prayer for the young man, whom they took to be a self-
deceiver” (411). This is before the days of the moderates, but “there were folks even then that
said the Lord had left the college professors to their ain devices, an’ the lads that went to study
wi’ them wad hae done mair and better sittin’ in a peat-bog, like their forbears of the persecution,
wi’ a Bible under their oxter [armpit] and a speerit o’ prayer in their heart” (411–12). To the
older generation, who lived through the Killing Time and remember the martyrdom of the
Covenanting ministers, Mr. Soulis needs “leevin’ experience in religion” (411)—living
29
experience that cannot be gained by reading divinity books, and that is certainly required to write
one, which is why it seems unfit that young Mr. Soulis is doing just that (412).
20

The tension between the new minister and the parish increases when the good folk in the
village learn that Mr. Soulis is considering hiring Janet M’Clour, an old “limmer,” or loose
woman, to be his servant. They explain that long ago, she had a baby to a dragoon—a military
title that implies the soldier was a Royalist, not a Covenanter—and that it had been maybe thirty
years since she took communion. Furthermore, the children had seen her mumbling to herself up
on Key’s Loan in the dusk, which was an “unco [strange] time an’ place for a God-fearin’
woman” (412).
21
But when they tell him that Janet is “sib to the deil [devil],” he dismisses it as
superstitious, and when they cast up their Bibles to him and remind him of the witch of Endor,
young Soulis “wad threep it doun their thrapples [force it down their throats] that thir days were
a’ gane by, and the deil was mercifully restrained” (412).
When the news that Janet is to be his servant spreads throughout the village, “the folk
were fair mad wi’ her and him thegether,” and some of the wives begin to harass Janet and
charge her with what is already known against her, “frae the sodger’s bairn to John Tamson’s
twa kye” (412).
22
Dissatisfied that Janet refuses to confess to witchcraft, the wives attack her;

20
In “Stevenson and the Covenanters: ‘Black Andie’s Tale Of Tod Lapraik’ and ‘Thrawn Janet,’” Kenneth
Gelder explains the comments of the older folk in the parish, which clearly exhibits Covenanter sympathies, and
“specifically recall the kind of complaint made by Patrick Walker in his Biographia Presbyteriana and paraphrased
by Stevenson elsewhere: that is, with regard to the past days of the persecution, ‘few of the Young incline or desire
now to be informed’” (65). For a more detailed analysis of Walker’s influence on Stevenson’s Scots tales, “The Tale
of Tod Lapraik” specifically, see Menikoff, Narrating Scotland, pp. 189–95.
21
This complaint against Janet for mumbling to herself connects to the description of the older Soulis pacing in
the strip of causeway by his house, groaning to himself (411).
22
This “from . . . to” construction emphasizes the fact that Janet’s reputation as a witch initiated from her affair
with a dragoon. And in moving from the soldier’s child to John Tamson’s two cows, the elliptical construction
underlines the “remorseless logic” of the labeling process once an individual is suspected of witchcraft. As Robin
Briggs explains in Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1996): “all
subsequent disputes and tensions risked being associated with some misfortune, while the suspect must sooner or
later become aware of the reputation that was building. Attempts to escape from it, or outface accusers, were all too
likely to backfire and be interpreted as further confirmation” (Briggs 163).
30
they claw the coats of her back and drag her down to the water of the Dule in order to see if she
swims or drowns (413). Fortunately, the rabble is interrupted by Soulis:
“Women,” said he (and he had a grand voice), “I charge you in the Lord’s name to let her
go.”
Janet ran to him—she was fair wud wi’ terror—an’ clang to him, an’ prayed him, for
Christ’s sake, save her from the cummers [scandalmongers]; an’ they, for their pairt, tault
him a’ that was ken’t, maybe mair.
“Woman,” says he to Janet, “is this true?”
“As the Lord sees me,” says she, “as the Lord made me, no a word o’t. Forbye the
bairn,” says she, “I’ve been a decent woman a’ my days.”
“Will you,” says Mr. Soulis, “in the name of God, and before me, His unworthy
minister, renounce the devil and his works?”
Weel, it wad appear that when he askit that, she gave a girn that fairly frichtit them
that saw her, an’ they could hear her teeth play dirl thegether in her chafts [chatter in her
cheeks]; but there was naething for it but the ae way oe the ither; an’ Janet lifted up her
hand and renounced the deil before them a’.” (413)
23

The next day, Janet is much transformed: “there was Janet comin’ doun the clachan
[village]—her or her likeness, nane could tell—wi’ her neck thrawn [twisted], and her heid on ae
side, like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp [corpse
unprepared for burial]” (413–14).
24
While the townspeople believe that this fearful “Thing” was
no longer Janet, but a supernatural bogle incarnated by the devil—most likely as vengeance for
her renunciation (Parsons 558)—Soulis proffers a rational explanation and he preaches about
nothing but the folk’s cruelty for inducing a stroke of palsy. He strikes at the children that

23
Parsons introduces several accounts of witchcraft, derived from various demonology books, legends, and
ballads, which may have inspired “Thrawn Janet”—and the rabbling scene in particular—including the relation of
Janet Corphat (or Cornfoot), who in 1704 was barbarously beaten for three hours without any interruption from
ministers or magistrates (558). In Scott’s Letters on Demonology (1830), Parsons finds an account of an old woman
who was captured and “then dragged through the river Ouse by a rope tied round her middle. . . . As she lay half
dead on the bank, they loaded the wretch with reproaches, and hardly forbore blows. A single humane bystander
took her part, and exposed himself to rough usage from doing so” (qtd. in Parsons 558). But of the many sources
that may have influenced Stevenson, Parsons believes “Thrawn Janet” is most indebted to Relation XXI, “Touching
Isabel Heriot,” relayed in George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685). For a detailed analysis of
the parallels between Janet M’Clour and Isabel Heriot, see “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet,’” pp.
565–68.
24
Parsons explains, “Sometimes the victims of witches suffer from thrawn necks, and at other times the witches
themselves are thus afflicted. We learn of Christian Shaw that ‘her forehead [was] drawn forcibly about toward her
shoulders . . . All the parts of her body becoming rigid and extended like a corpse, her head was twisted around.’” A
thrawn neck also alludes to a form of torture—namely, binding or “thrawing his head with a rope”—that was used to
compel witches and warlocks to confess (Parson 553).
31
meddle with Janet, and that very night, Soulis invites her up the manse to dwell with him there
under the Hanging Shaw (414).
After some time passes, the “idler sort” begin to think more lightly of that “black
business.” But, the narrator hastens to add, though the Reverend Soulis seemed pleased with
himself and indifferent at first, anybody could see he was wasting away (414), and thereby
suggests that perhaps the minister is a self-deceiver, as the old folk in the parish have long
suspected. Of course, the narrator is also building up toward the dramatic climax of the story,
which begins shortly after this period of relative calm, when an unprecedented heat wave afflicts
the village near the end of July. No one suffers from the uncanny weather as much as Mr. Soulis,
however; he can neither sleep nor eat, and when he is not writing his “weary book,” he roams the
parched countryside “like a man possessed,” while everyone else keeps cool by staying indoors
(414).
During one of his usual strolls to an abandoned graveyard that was consecrated by Papists
“before the blessed licht shone upon the kingdom” (414), Soulis sees seven ravens and then a
man, “or the appearance of a man, sitting upon a grave.
25
He was of a great stature, an’ black a
hell, and his e’en were singular to see” (414–5).
26
Although this is the moment that “the minister

25
Abandoned ruins, Catholic past, seven ravens, and the devil sitting upon a grave—welcome to the Scottish
Gothic.
26
After “Thrawn Janet” was first published in Cornhill Magazine, October 1881, Stevenson inserted a
footnote—most likely in response to an inquiry from his friend, W.E. Henley (Letters 3:217n.3)—to explain the
significance of the black man: “It was common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a black man. This
appears in several witch trials and I think in Law’s Memorials, that delightful storehouse of the quaint and grisly”
(415). Just over a decade later, in Catriona’s “The Tale of Tod Lapraik” (1892), which has much in common with
“Thrawn Janet,” Stevenson also includes an explanatory note in order to clarify the confusion that David
experiences when he is told by Neil that the tune David hums and associates with Alan is a bogle’s song. It is at this
point that Stevenson interrupts to explain: “A learned folklorist of my acquaintance hereby identifies Alan’s air. It
has been printed (it seems) in Campbell’s Tales of the West Highlands, Vol. II, p. 91. . .”—and again, Stevenson
downplays his authority with his parenthetical comment.
32
is awakened to the living power of folklore,” as Julia Reid says in “Robert Louis Stevenson and
the ‘Romance of Anthropology’” (2005), Soulis does his best to retain his enlightened outlook.
Despite feeling the “cauld grue in the marrow o’ his bones,” the minister asks in tones of
civilized hospitality: “My friend, are you a stranger in this place?” (Reid 54; Stevenson 415).
Without saying a word, the stranger exits the graveyard and runs in the direction of the woods,
and without knowing why, Soulis chases the man but cannot catch up. The minister thinks he
spots the stranger approaching his manse, but when Soulis reaches it, there is no one to be seen;
however, when he enters his house and sees Janet, the minister experiences the same “cauld and
deidly grue” (415). Mr. Soulis asks Janet if she has seen a black man, and she replies, “Save us
a’! Ye’re no wise, minister. There’s nae black man in a’ Ba’weary.” Reverend Soulis proclaims
that if there was no black man, then he has spoken with “the Accuser of the Brethren” (415)—a
reference to the devil found in the Book of Revelation, 12:10—yet another indication that Soulis
is on his way to becoming a believer in witchcraft.
But Soulis still has his doubts that the devil is in Balweary, and he goes to his study to
reflect. He thinks about his home, of when he was a child running playfully on the braes, but the
black man runs through his head like the refrain of a song; in fact, the more he thinks, the more
he thinks of the black man. And here, right at the start of what is a truly heartrending scene full
of much pathos, Stevenson subtly calls attention to the narrativity of this passage—or, to be
precise, the fact that the frame narrator is relaying a story from one of the locals, who heard it
from the elders, who presumably heard it from the minister—when the local narrator recounts,

Regarding this “authentic and accurate” insertion in “Tod Lapraik,” Menikoff states: “That Stevenson would
find and exploit this national treasure is not surprising. That he would cite it directly, however, is unusual. In a way,
he is engaging in a form of postmodernist textual play, unexceptional for an audience raised on Jorge Luis Borges
and John Barth, but quite uncommon for reader in the eighteen-nineties (sic)” (184). While the footnote in “Tod
Lapraik” is certainly more unconventional—simply by virtues of the fact that the author explains something to the
reader, while leaving his protagonist in the dark—the note to “Thrawn Janet” has a flippant tone in which Stevenson
downplays his scholarly knowledge and this seems to have been written in the spirit of self-conscious, textual play,
especially when considered alongside other self-reflexive nuances that Stevenson introduces into the narrative.
33
He tried the prayer, an’ the words wouldnae come to him; an’ he tried, they say, to write
at his book, but he could nae mak’ nae mair o’ that. There was whiles he thocht the black
man was at his oxter, an’ the swat stood upon him cauld as well-water; and there was
other whiles, when he cam to himsel’ like a christened bairn and minded naething. (416,
emphasis added)

This brief interruption, and the connection, through the word “oxter” (armpit), to an earlier
moment in which Soulis is compared to the Covenanting ministers of the previous generation
“wi’ a Bible under their oxter,” suggest that the minister’s inability to write in his book is an
integral part of this conversion narrative, at least as far as the parishioners are concerned.
For the upshot of the minister’s inability to focus on his book is that it brings him to the
window of his study, where he can instead focus on Janet, which not only adds yet another
dimension to this multilayered narrative focalization, but also likens Soulis to a late-Victorian
evolutionary anthropologist viewing the Other, the object of knowledge, from a distance
(Mighall, A Geography 135).
27
The minister observes Janet from afar, as she washes clothes in
the Dule water with her coats kilted, and the local narrator describes what Soulis sees:
She had her back to the minister, an’ he, for his pairt, hardly kenned what he was lookin’
at. Syne she turned round, an’ shawed her face; Mr. Soulis had the same cauld grue as
twice that day afore, an’ it was borne in upon him what folks said, that Janet was deid
lang syne, an’ this was a bogle in the clay cauld flesh. He drew back a pickle and he
scanned her narrowly. She was tramp-trampin’ in the cla’es, croonin’ to hersel’; and eh!
Gude guide us, but it was a fearsome face. Whiles she sang louder, but there was nae man
born o’ woman that could tell the words o’ her sang; an’ while she lookit side-lang doun,
but there was naething there for her to look at. There gaed a scunner through the flesh
upon his banes; and what was Heeven’s advertisement. (416)

But rather than trust in heaven’s sign, Soulis makes one last attempt to diminish his mounting
terror and blames himself for thinking so ill of a poor, old, afflicted woman who had no friend
but the minister. He says a prayer for the both of them, and goes up to his “naked bed” in the
twilight (416).

27
Because Reverend Soulis is a university-educated young man from the lowlands, observing an uneducated,
older woman from the highlands from afar, this scene gestures at both the spatial and the temporal distance such
objectification required. For more on the influence of late-Victorian scientific discourse on the Gothic, see
“Atavism: A Darwinian Nightmare,” in Robert Mighall’s A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), chapter
four.
34
That night, which is the night of August 17, 1712, the weather is hotter than ever. Mr.
Soulis tosses and turns in his bed; he hears bogles gossiping in his ears and sees spunkies in the
room. Just as he begins to reflect again on the black man and Janet, and the connection between
the two, Soulis hears a scuffle and a bang in Janet’s room, and then the house is once more silent
as the grave (417). The minister goes to her room and looks around, and discovers Janet’s
corpse, impossibly, “hingin’ frae a single nail an’ by a single worsted thread for darnin’ hose”—a
position that her thrawn neck had long suggested (418). Horrorstruck, Soulis locks the door
behind him and exits the house into the dark of the night with only a candle to light his way; but
soon he hears noises upstairs, footsteps on the stairs, and then Janet reappears on the threshold of
his house. As the revenant approaches the reverend, she tries to speak but when no words reach
her lips, Soulis musters all his courage and cries: “Witch, beldame, devil… I charge you, by the
power of God, begone—if you be dead, to the grave—if you be damned, to hell!” (419). At
this—and here I am translating the Scots for clarity—the Lord’s own hand from the Heavens
struck the Horror where it stood; the old, dead, desecrated corpse of the witch-wife, so long kept
from the grave and shuttled round by devils, lighted up like a brimstone spark and fell in ashes to
the ground; the thunder followed, peal on piercing peal, the roaring rain upon the back of that;
and Mr. Soulis leapt through the garden hedge, and ran, with scream upon scream, for the
village (419).
The next day, two villagers, John Christie and Sandy M’Lellan, see the black man as he
leaves the parish in the early hours of morning, and there is little doubt that it has been he who
dwelled for so long in Janet’s body (419). The reverend takes to his bed raving and when he
finally recovers, he is the severe, bleak-faced man with the wild, scared, and uncertain eyes who
was described at the start of the narrative (410)—a familiar stranger, who for fifty years has lived
35
in an uncanny manse on the edge of the community. The living experience of religion has
transformed Soulis into an animated corpse more frightening than the one he exorcised.
Stevenson greatly admired this story; in June of 1881, he wrote to Sydney Colvin,
“‘Thrawn Janet’ is off to [Leslie] Stephen, but as it is all in Scotch he cannot take it, I know. It
was so good, I could not help sending it. . . . ‘Thrawn Janet’ scared me to death” (Letters 3:188).
Contrary to Stevenson’s expectation, Stephen accepted it for publication that very month, stating
that the dialect would not deceive him to the general merits of a good and characteristic story
(3:188n.2). Over a decade later in April of 1893, a reflective Stevenson wrote to Colvin: “Tod
Lapraik is a piece of living Scots: if I had never writ anything but that and Thrawn Janet, still I’d
have been a writer” (qtd. in Swearingen, Early Literary 395). But in the intervening years,
Stevenson appears to have entertained some doubts about the story; in an unpublished preface to
The Merry Men (1887), he writes that “Thrawn Janet” has two defects: “it is true only
historically, true for a hill parish in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind and the world.
Poor Soulis’ faults we may eagerly recognise as virtues, and we feel that by his conversion he
was merely worsened; and this, although the story carries me away every time I read it, leaves a
painful impression on my mind” (qtd. in Early Literary 394).
It is quite possible these seeds of doubt were first sown by W.E. Henley, who, based on a
letter that Stevenson wrote to him, appears to have received the proof of “Thrawn Janet” in
August 1881 and found it puzzling. Although we do not have Henley’s original letter,
Stevenson’s humorous reply—rough Scots (or Scotch) included—gives us an idea of what it
contained:
My dear Henley, I believe sir that your boasted penetration halts. What was the minister’s
sin? Almighty powers, did he not take a notorious reputed witch for a servant? did he no
even, but we’ll hope he didnae mean it, express open infidelity as to the works of
darkness? I believe ye’ll be a secret unbeliever yoursel’. What was his sin, quo’ he! . . . .
36
For the rest you are right—it is too hurried and scrappy. The spelling of Scotch is too
much for me; I cannot hold up my head under it. (Letters 3:217)

Regardless of whether or not Henley’s comments about “Thrawn Janet” did, indeed, have a
delayed effect on Stevenson, the latter’s response brings up an important question: what was the
minister’s sin? Or, as Stevenson put it years later, what are these faults that we may easily
recognize as virtues?
28

The most immediate answer is that Soulis is a hypocrite. Accepting the possibility of
witchcraft, we see that he too quickly dismisses the elders in the parish for their belief in magic,
insisting instead on the superiority of his modern religious outlook. Soulis even goes so far as to
invite Janet into his home, despite the fact that her changed appearance evinces her diabolic
nature. When Soulis finally accepts that Janet is a witch, his conversion pushes him to the other
extreme, and his fanaticism exceeds that of the villagers, and thus, the distance between the
reverend and the congregation only intensifies—fifty years later, he is a living legend. Putting
the possibility of witchcraft to the side, Soulis’s superior attitude is still disrespectful; instead of
trying to get to the bottom of the villager’s animosity toward Janet, which appears to be rooted in
a feeling of betrayal, he uses Janet to set an example of neighbor-love, and, as a result, only
formalizes her ostracized position by having Janet live with him on the outskirts of the
community. Then, unable to maintain the necessary distance from Janet and the otherness she
represents, Soulis banishes her. But—and maybe this is why Soulis’s conversion is so painful—
in his disavowal of Janet, or “that Thing” (414), Soulis disavows the absolute alterity he houses

28
Swearingen explains, Stevenson seems finally to have agreed with Henry James’s 1888 estimate of “Thrawn
Janet”: “Praising RLS’s command of dialect and advancing it as proof of his craftsmanship that RLS had not only
this style but many others at his command, James called this story ‘a masterpiece in thirteen pages . . . among the
shorter [stories], the strongest in execution’” (Early Literary 394–95).
37
within; for, as Lacan proclaims, “the fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. . . .
also dwells within me” (186).
29

And yet, I cannot help but think that Soulis’s fault—at least as far as his neighbor ethics
are concerned—begins with the neighborly act itself. Although Soulis endeavors to be a neighbor
when he rescues Janet from the rabble, the conditions of his hospitality are exacting from the
start. Janet declares “As the Lord sees me . . . as the Lord made me . . . I’ve been a decent
woman,” but he still requires her to renounce the devil in the name of God and before his
unworthy minister (413), and thus submits Janet to his sovereignty before he invites her to cross
the threshold of his home. Therefore, I am positing a third possibility to Janet’s thrawn neck, but
one that is figurative rather than natural or supernatural: namely, Soulis puts Janet’s neck in a
halter and makes her the hostage to his own saintly act.
30
While Soulis’s faith in God (and
disbelief in magic) helps him to maintain a delicate balance for a time, he is far from the
university where the human spirit seems knowable—including his own—and his anxiety mounts.
The shift from hospitality to hostility occurs on the afternoon of August 17, 1712, when
Soulis submits Janet to his gaze and watches from his window as she looks sidelong down at
nothing, and he experiences a feeling of disgust, a repugnant shudder, in the flesh upon his bones
(416). In Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (1999), Jill Robbins explains
In an early version of the murder analysis, where the face is said to deliver its prohibition
against murder, Levinas writes: “Violence consists in ignoring this opposition, ignoring

29
This is where Lacan differs from Freud, who concludes that the Nebenmensch complex is resolved when
cognition reduces the other to the same through the activity of judgment, and thus the subject-object dualism is
restored (Critchley, Ethics 210).
30
In Of Hospitality (2000), Derrida shows how the word “hôte,” which can mean either “host” or “guest,”
signifies the tension between the law of absolute hospitality, or “just hospitality,” and “hospitality by right, with law
or justice as rights” (25). In other words, Derrida represents the irreconcilability of, on the one hand, unconditional
hospitality, which requires a host to welcome an unknown other for an unlimited amount of time and thereby invites
the guest to become the host’s host, and, on the other, the conditional hospitality that gives the host right to resist
becoming a hostage and to protect himself and his possessions (125).
I chose this particular turn of phrase (“put one’s neck in a halter”) because Fettes uses it in “The Body
Snatcher” (85). There were many to choose from, including those that could address the fact that later, Janet’s
corpse is hanging from a thread.
38
the face of a being, avoiding the gaze, and catching sight of an angle whereby the no
inscribed on a face by the very fact that it is a face becomes a hostile or a submissive
force. Violence is a way of acting on every being and every freedom by approaching it
from an indirect angle.” (17–18)

Soulis’s subsequent transformation can be interpreted accordingly: “to approach the other from
an angle is to lose face (to lose the face of the other and always also to lose one’s own face)”
(18). Or, to put it in Stevenson’s language: the face of the other is where the soul is; to lose the
face of the other is to be soulless.
“The Body Snatcher”
As early as 1879, the year that Stevenson drafted Lay Morals, he and Edmund Gosse
discussed working together on a project about famous murders (Swearingen, The Prose Writings
73). In late 1881, Century Magazine accepted Gosse’s proposal for a series of articles on the
subject (74), and in December, Stevenson wrote Gosse to say “I shall give my mind at once to
the Murder” (Letters 3:271). Sidney Colvin, who edited the first edition of The Letters of Robert
Louis Stevenson, suggests in an editorial comment that the series would begin with the Elstree
murder of 1823 (1:75).
31
However, in Critical Kit-Kats (1896), published two years after
Stevenson’s death, Gosse states that the first installment would concern the Red Barn murders of
1827:
Louis and I had a good deal of correspondence about a work which he had proposed that
we should undertake in collaboration—a retelling, in choice literary form, of the most
picturesque murder cases of the last hundred years. We were to visit the scenes of these
crimes, and turn over the evidence. The great thing, Louis said, was not to begin to write
until we were thoroughly alarmed. “These things must be done, my boy, under the very
shudder of goose-flesh.” We were to begin with the “Story of the Red Barn,” which
indeed is a tale preeminently worthy to be retold by Stevenson. But the scheme never
came off, and is another of the dead leaves in his Vallombrosa. (292)

31
This is the only citation from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson edited by Colvin. All other citations,
including the previous excerpt from the same December 26, 1881 letter to Gosse, refer to The Letters of Robert
Louis Stevenson edited by Booth and Mehew.
39
Although the collaborative effort was abandoned and William Roughead would instead
be credited as the British dean of true-crime writing (Schechter 217), Gosse’s recollection of the
book’s inception is nonetheless significant because it highlights Stevenson’s often-
underemphasized interest in historical true crime. It also allows one to recognize that with “The
Body Snatcher,” which concerns the West Port murders of Burke and Hare (1827–1828),
Stevenson had singlehandedly created an innovative Gothic style that, in many ways, fits
Gosse’s description. Needless to say, it seems quite fitting that in William Roughead’s
introductory comments to Burke and Hare (1921), he pays tribute to Stevenson when he writes,
“the literature of the West Port murders inspired the grisliest of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tales,
The Body Snatcher, wherein, granting the subject to be a legitimate matter of fiction . . . we are
given the very atmosphere of that horrid business, and share in all the terrors of the time” (2).
32

Stevenson did not have the same high opinion of “The Body Snatchers,” however; in
July, he wrote Colvin from Pitlochry explaining that the story “is laid aside in a justifiable
disgust, the tale being horrid” (Letters 3:204). But Stevenson was not so disgusted as to lay it
aside forever and he published it a few years later, in December of 1884, when he was under
pressure to submit a Christmas tale to the Pall Mall Gazette, and his new story “Markheim”
proved too short for the magazine. While some critics concur that “The Body Snatcher” is not on
par with Stevenson’s best stories—for instance, Francis Watt makes no attempt to suppress his
opinion that the supernatural twist at the conclusion is a major fault (68–69)—others, including
William Roughead, disagree with the author about his own work. In a recent article for the

32
Edinburgh’s West Port neighborhood just outside the old west gate of the city, extending from the area in Old
Town known as the Grassmarket, which in 1828 was a warren of tenements and tightly wound closes, or alleys
(Symonds 21). The Grassmarket and the neighboring closes running off the High Street in Old Town “had been
abandoned by most fashionable people in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when many families migrated
north to the recently built, and still building, New Town. With its neoclassical squares, circles, gardens, gates, and
sunlit rooms, it was a monument not only to the Enlightenment, but also to a new domesticity. In sharp contrast, the
West Port and much of the Old Town came to house the laboring poor” (21).
40
Lancet, Ruth Richardson wonders if perhaps Stevenson’s decision to table the story can be traced
to Fanny, “his critic on the hearth,” who had reservations (412), and then moves on to refute J.C.
Furnas’s belief that “The Body Snatcher” is a potboiler. Richardson asserts, “I think he missed
its depths: Stevenson’s acute analysis of degrees of guilt; the complicit socialization of maleness;
the hypocrisies which so often lie behind worldly success; the damage behind apparent failures;
the dark silences that can exist in social relations that pass as bonhomie” (413).
I agree with Richardson, and I believe that Stevenson was able to accomplish such
nuances because of his choice of focal characters. Rather than revolve the story around Burke
and Hare, the two entrepreneurial murderers who posed as resurrectionists and were convicted on
sixteen counts of murder, or around their beneficiary, the famous anatomist Dr. Knox, Stevenson
focalizes through Fettes, the young anatomy assistant who is thrust into a threshold position and
must decide whether or not to be a neighbor.
33
Stevenson investigates Fettes’s psychology—
perhaps not the type of crime scene Gosse intended but a crime scene nonetheless—as he goes
from being a subassistant in anatomy to a subassistant in murder when he decides to keep silent
about the heinous truth of the cadavers. In the following pages, I will show that Fettes not only
fails to be a neighbor to the murdered victims who regularly appear on the dissecting table, but,
by choosing to disregard his inner-voice and instead listen to Wolfe Macfarlane, a more senior
assistant, Fettes fails to be a neighbor to himself.

33
There were several assistants who, like Knox, were implicated in the murders but never tried or convicted. In
Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, & Moveable Goods (2006), Deborah Symonds explains that although Knox
was never formally tried because the government wanted to avoid exposing the terrible system that forced medical
authorities to rely on bodysnatching—a system that would be moderately reformed in 1832 with the Anatomy Act—
Knox was nonetheless the subject of much public outcry (97), culminating in a rabble that burned his effigy outside
his residence (Lonsdale 109). By the mid-1830s, Knox’s career had declined considerably, and in the 1840s, he
moved to London’s East End where he practiced medicine to support himself and where he died, likely of apoplexy,
in 1862 (97). While I will discuss various aspects of this shocking signal crime throughout this section, there are
several book-length studies—both historical and more recent—available on the subject, including William
Roughead’s Burke and Hare (1921), which includes a transcript of the trial; and, as mentioned above, Symonds’s
Notorious Murders. For a comprehensive study of the history of anatomy, see Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection
and the Destitute (1987).
41
“The Body Snatcher” follows a similar narrative trajectory as “Thrawn Janet.” It begins
in Debenham, a small English village roughly four hundred miles southeast of Edinburgh, in the
1850s or 1860s, when Fettes is “an old drunken Scotchmen” (73). The frame narrator tells little
about himself except that he is a local who spends every night at the George Inn in the company
of the landlord, the undertaker, and the melancholic Fettes, whom the narrator seems to know
only socially when he describes him as “a man of education obviously, and a man of some
property; since he lived in idleness. . . . his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable
vices, were all things of course in Debenham” (73). One night, a London doctor is sent for after a
guest at the George Inn falls ill to apoplexy, and upon hearing the innkeeper announce that Dr.
Macfarlane has just arrived, the narrator watches Fettes transform, “as if a man had risen from
the dead” (74). Echoing the threshold scene in “Thrawn Janet,” Fettes confronts the doctor face-
to-face on the threshold of the George:
The London man almost staggered; he stared for the swiftest of seconds at the man before
him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then in a startled whisper, “Fettes!” he
said, “you!”
“Ay,” said the other, “me. Did you think I was dead, too? We are not so easy shot of
our acquaintance.”
“Hush, hush!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Hush, hush! this meeting is so unexpected—I
can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at first; but I am overjoyed, to
have this opportunity. For the present it must be how-d’ye-do and good-bye in one; for
my fly is waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall—let me see—yes—you
should give me your address, and you can count on early news of me. We must do
something for you, Fettes; I fear you are out at elbows; but we must see to that—for auld
lang syne, as once we sang at suppers.”
“Money!” cried Fettes; “money from you! The money that I had of you is lying
where I cast it in the rain.”
Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and confidence;
but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into his first confusion. A
horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable countenance. “My dear
fellow,” he said, “be it as you please; my last thought is to offend you. I would intrude on
none. I will leave you my address, however.”
“I do not wish it; I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,” interrupted the
other. “I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I wished to know if, after all, there
was a God; I know now that there is none. Begone!”
He stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway; and the great
London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to step upon one side. It was plain
that he hesitated before the thought of this humiliation. . . . The presence of so many
42
witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on the wainscot,
and made a dart, like a serpent, striking for the door. But his tribulation was not yet
entirely at an end; for even as he was passing Fettes clutched him by the arm, and these
words came in a whisper, and yet painfully distinct, “Have you seen it again?”
The great, rich London doctor cried aloud with a sharp, throttling cry; he dashed his
questioner across the open space, and, with his hands over his head, fled out of the door
like a detected thief. (75–77)

After witnessing the mysterious conversation between the old acquaintances, Fettes’s three
drinking companions wonder at the history behind this run-in and the meaning of Fettes’s sinister
warning: “See if you can hold your tongues . . . That man, Macfarlane, is not safe to cross; those
that have done so already, have repented it too late” (77).
The narrator soon finds a way to “worm” the story out of Fettes, and the narrative moves
backward in time (and through space) to Edinburgh in the late 1820s, when Fettes is a student
and the subassistant of Dr. K—. One of Fettes’s duties is to receive the early morning deliveries
of “the unfriended relics of humanity” used for dissection, and he is precisely the man for the
job:
Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among
the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against all considerations; he was incapable
of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low
ambitions. . . . He coveted besides a measure of consideration from his masters and his
fellow-pupils and he had no desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. (78–
79)

For a while, Fettes even manages to stifle his suspicion of the “unclean and desperate
interlopers” (78). After all, Dr. K— had been quite clear about the policy: “‘They bring the body,
and we pay the price,’ he used to say—dwelling on the alliteration—‘quid pro quo.’ And again,
somewhat profanely, ‘Ask no questions,’ he would tell his assistants, ‘for conscience’s sake’”
(79). But one November morning, this “policy of silence” is put to the test (79); the two ruffians
give Fettes undeniable proof that they are indeed murderers when they deliver the corpse of Jane
Galbraith, who Fettes identifies “By a dozen unquestionable marks . . . the girl he had jested with
the day before; he saw with horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence” (80).
43
Although Stevenson alters the name of the victim and the date of the incident, Jane Galbraith is
easily identified by the reader as well—she is the fictional counterpart of Mary Paterson, a young
and notably good-looking prostitute who was recognized by William Fergusson, one of Dr.
Knox’s assistants, when Burke and Hare delivered her corpse on April 9, 1828 (Roughead 28),
six months and eleven murders before Burke and Hare are finally arrested (Richardson Death
327).
34

Although Fettes admits that he had possessed only “a modicum of prudence, miscalled
morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or punishable theft” (79), the young
student is quite affected by this unfortunate discovery and considers soberly “the danger to
himself of interference in so serious a business” (81). He decides to seek the counsel of his
immediate superior, Macfarlane, the much admired class assistant, because “their relative
positions called for some community of life,” and Fettes is surprised to learn that Macfarlane,
and by implication Dr. K—, has known the truth about the gravediggers all along (81).
35
Even
though Jane Galbraith is “as well known as the Castle Rock,” Macfarlane advises Fettes “not to
stir up the mud”: “‘I’m as sorry as you are this should have come here,’ tapping the body with
his cane. ‘The next best thing for me is not to recognize it; and,’ he added coolly, ‘I don’t. You

34
Like Fettes, Fergusson briefly questioned the murderers about the circumstances of Paterson’s death. Burke’s
explanation was that they purchased the body from an old woman at the Canongate (Symonds 121), which
Fergusson accepted, although it was decided that Burke should cut off her hair to make her less recognizable
(Roughead 28). Paterson’s body was preserved for some time in whiskey and then, alongside dissection, Knox
allowed his students and even an artist to sketch her because of her perfect form. However, not everyone kept silent;
the anatomist Robert Liston came to see Paterson’s body, suspected foul play, and felt that it was indecent that
students should dissect the body of a woman they likely had sex with when she was alive. He confronted Knox in
front of his students—he even threw a punch—and removed the body for burial. Liston then wrote a letter to
Thomas Wakely, who was a member of the Parliamentary Committee on anatomy, but unfortunately Knox was not
investigated and Burke and Hare carried on business as usual (Richardson 327). Symonds suggests that although
Liston’s letter went unheeded, Knox must have learned from the experience. When Burke and Hare sold Knox the
body of Daft Jamie, a well-known local “innocent” who was visibly handicapped, Knox had Jamie’s head and
deformed feet removed and destroyed (122).
35
As young men, both Fettes and Macfarlane are modeled on William Fergusson, but it is Macfarlane who
ultimately represents the real-life Fergusson, who despite his association with the West Port murders, eventually
became sergeant-surgeon to Queen Victoria and the president of The Royal College of Surgeons of England
(Roughead 28n.29). Fettes can thus be interpreted as Stevenson’s vision of Fergusson’s alter ego.
44
may, if you please’” (81). But Macfarlane does not really mean what he says; he persuades Fettes
to follow his lead and he uses their relative positions to appeal to Fettes’s self-interest: “I should
like to know how any one of us would look in any Christian witness-box” (81), and his vanity:
“The question is, why did he choose us two for his assistants? And I answer, because he didn’t
want old wives” (82). This last “was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes,”
and he agrees to imitate Macfarlane, and sure enough, “no one remarked or appeared to
recognize” Jane on the dissecting table (82).
36

Feeling confident in his decision, Fettes resumes his normal routine. One afternoon after
work, he goes to a popular tavern where he sees Macfarlane sitting with a stranger, “a small man,
very pale and dark, with cold black eyes. . . . his features gave a promise of intellect and
refinement which was but feebly realized in his manners; for he proved, upon a nearer
acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, and stupid” (82). Fettes notices that the stranger, whose name is
Gray, exercises considerable control over Macfarlane—later that night, Gray forces Macfarlane
to pay for the entire feast that the three of them enjoy—and yet, this most offensive person takes
a fancy to Fettes, and the lad’s vanity is tickled by the attention of so loathsome a rogue. We
never discover what damning information Gray has on “Toddy” Macfarlane, as he jeeringly calls
him, but Gray indicates that it must be quite significant when he tells Fettes,
“Did you ever see the lads play knife? He [Macfarlane] would like to do that all over my
body,” remarked the stranger.
“We medicals have a better way than that,” said Fettes. “When we dislike a dear
friend of ours, we dissect him.”
Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to the mind. (82)
37

36
Fettes’s description of the young Macfarlane makes it easy to understand why the latter’s approval carries so
much weight: “Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and
unscrupulous to the last degree. He had travelled and studied abroad; his manners were agreeable and a little
forward; he was an authority upon the stage, skilful on the ice or the links with skate or golf club; he dressed with
nice audacity, and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong, trotting horse” (81).
37
With Gray’s Hyde-like appearance, and Fettes’s insinuation that Gray is blackmailing Macfarlane, this scene
anticipates Jekyll and Hyde, in which Utterson feels certain that Hyde must be blackmailing Jekyll with his
knowledge of some secret sins of the past.
45

It is no wonder, then, that Fettes experiences a cruel shock when, a couple of days later, it
is Macfarlane who rings the well-known signal at four in the morning with a delivery:
To see, fixed in the rigidity of death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man
whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin, upon the threshold of the tavern,
awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the conscience. It was a cras
tibi [tomorrow you] which re-echoed in his soul, that two whom he had known should
have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet these were secondary thoughts. His first
concern regarded Wolfe. Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to
look his comrade in the face; he durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words nor
voice at his command.
It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly behind
and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other’s shoulder.
“Richardson,” said he, “may have the head.” (83–84, emphasis added)

With Fettes speechless, Macfarlane continues to discuss business, and insists that he must be
paid, so that the accounts will tally. Terrified, and hoping to avoid a quarrel with the murderer,
Fettes agrees to enter the payment in his book as Macfarlane wishes. But Macfarlane does not
simply want to balance the account, he wants to balance the burden of responsibility; he explains
that it is only fair that Fettes should pocket the lucre, but Macfarlane must make his case:
“Macfarlane,” began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely. “I have put my neck in a halter to
oblige you.”
“To oblige me?” cried Wolfe. “Oh come! You did, as near as I can see the matter,
what you downright had to do in self-defense. Suppose I got into trouble, where would
you be? This second little matter flows clearly from the first; Mr. Gray is the continuation
of Miss Galbraith; you can’t begin and then stop; if you begin, you must keep on
beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.”
A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of
the unhappy student.
“My God!” he cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be made a
class assistant—in the name of reason, where’s the harm in that? Service wanted the
position; Service might have got it. Would he have been where I am now?
“My dear fellow,” said Macfarlane, “what a boy you are! What harm has come to
you? What harm can come to you if you hold your tongue? Why, man, do you know
what this life is? There are two squads of us—the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb,
you’ll come to lie upon these tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll
live and drive a horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage.
You’re staggered at the first. But look at K—! My dear fellow, you’re clever, you have
pluck, I like you, and K— likes you; you were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my
honour and my experience of life, three days from now you’ll laugh at all these
scarecrows like a high-school boy at a farce.” (85)

46
By inserting Macfarlane’s copycat murder into an otherwise historically accurate plot,
Stevenson cuts to the heart of the social prejudices that determined almost every aspect of the
West Port murders, beginning with the fact that Burke and Hare exploited deeply entrenched
assumptions about class by purposely selecting “friendless commodities”—widows, orphans,
street-walkers, and imbeciles—as their victims (Symonds 28), and ending with Knox’s defensive
strategy in which he claimed to be a target of popular prejudice, and attempted to dissociate
himself and his students (the better classes) from Burke and Hare, the criminal monsters
(McCracken-Flesher 137).
38
Although Fettes is affected when Jane Galbraith appears on the
dissecting table, he can easily dissociate himself from her because she is a prostitute, and her
value—usage that is exchanged in the relations between men (Irigaray, This Sex 186)—is
amenable to death. However, Fettes experiences a cras-tibi revelation upon seeing Gray because
even if Gray is a loathsome rogue with few friends, he is a man of somewhat relative position—a
man with whom he enjoyed a sumptuous feast (82)—and in his presence, Fettes cannot deny the
substitutability between himself and this other.
Macfarlane makes a bid for Fettes’s silence by guaranteeing the subassistant will be free
from the pangs of conscience once he recognizes the difference between the lambs (Jane
Galbraith, Gray, and, according to his logic, anyone else who comes to lie upon the dissection
table), and the lions (K—, Macfarlane, and Fettes, if he fulfills his potential to lead the hunt). But
the question is not whether Fettes is a lion or a lamb; it is whether he will accept Macfarlane’s

38
As far as I know, none of Dr. Knox’s assistants was ever suspected of committing murder, and thus, Gray’s
murder is an example of Stevenson’s innovative fiction, though it is possible he may have been influenced by some
of the “low” literary and dramatic productions about the West Port Murders. For a discussion of the popular tales,
ballads, and melodramas that Burke and Hare inspired, see Flanders’s The Invention of Murder, pp. 62-75. For more
on Knox’s reticent response to the murders, and how it relates to issues of class and Scottish national identity, see
Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s “Burking the Scottish Body: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Resurrection Men”
(2006). And, for a wonderfully partial justification of Knox, embedded in a brief history of modern medicine as a
history of injustice, see A Sketch of the Life and Writing of Robert Knox (1870), written by one of Knox’s former
students, Robert Lonsdale, who dedicated his book to William Fergusson.
47
triumphalist version of history in the first place. And the way the young Fettes views his current
situation reveals that he does not see any alternative:
He saw the miserable peril in which he stood involved; he saw, with inexpressible
dismay, that there was no limit to his weakness, and that, from concession to concession,
he had fallen from the arbiter of Macfarlane’s destiny to his paid and helpless
accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver at the time, but it
did not occur to him that he might still be brave. The secret of Jane Galbraith and the
cursed entry in the day book closed his mouth. (85–6, emphasis added)
39

Before the week is through, Macfarlane’s prophecy is fulfilled. Fettes outlives his terrors
and begins to plume himself upon his courage, “and had so arranged the story in his mind that he
could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride” (86). Macfarlane had stayed away for
the first couple of days, but after he returns, Fettes still sees little of his accomplice. Though
Macfarlane is jovial and kind, he avoids any reference to their common secret; and, “even when
Fettes whispered to him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and forsworn the lambs, he only
signed to him smilingly to hold his peace” (86). But the two are thrust into each other’s company
soon enough, when there is a shortage of corpses at the anatomy school and Dr. K— sends Fettes
and Macfarlane on an excursion to the rustic graveyard of Glencorse in order to disinter the body
of a recently deceased farmer’s wife.
It is a silent drive through the rain to Penicuik, where they will spend the evening, they
stop once to hide their digging implements in a thick bush near the courtyard, then head to
Fisher’s Tryst, where the gig is housed, the horse fed, and the two young doctors sit down to the
best dinner and the best wine the house afforded (87–88). As the meal comes to a close,
Macfarlane gives Fettes some gold coins as a compliment between friends, and this time, Fettes

39
While it is unclear if it is Fettes or the local narrator relaying Fettes’s story who editorializes, “it did not occur
to him that he might still be brave,” the comment nonetheless suggests that there are alternatives to being either
“arbiter of Macfarlane’s destiny” or “helpless accomplice,” even if Fettes does not understand this. And yet, brave is
put in opposition to Fettes’s weakness, so perhaps to “still be brave” would simply mean for Fettes to reclaim his
power over Macfarlane’s destiny, and this more cynical reading—in which Fettes and Macfarlane are engaged in an
unneighborly struggle for power over the other—could be supported by their conversation on the threshold of the
George, where Fettes corners and intimidates Macfarlane.
48
happily pockets the money, demonstrating his evolution. But similar to Reverend Soulis, Fettes
seems to have overshot the mark:
“You are a philosopher,” he cried. “I was an ass till I knew you. You and K— between
you, by the Lord Harry, but you’ll make a man of me.”
“Of course we shall,” applauded Macfarlane. “A man? I’ll tell you it required a man
to back me up the other morning. There are some big, brawling, forty-year-old cowards
would have turned sick at the look of the d—d thing; but not you—you kept your head. I
watched you.”
“Well, and why not?” Fettes thus vaunted himself. “It was no affair of mine. There
was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on the other I could count on
your gratitude, don’t you see? And he slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.”
Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant words; he may
have regretted that he had taught his young companion so successfully; but he had no
time to interfere, for the other noisily continued in this boastful strain.
“The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don’t want to
hang—that’s practical—but for cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God,
devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all that old gallery of curiosities—they may frighten
boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here’s to the memory of
Gray!” (88)

Perhaps the most painful element of this exchange is the fact that, after all these years, Fettes still
does not understand what it is about his behavior that alarms Macfarlane. If Macfarlane indeed
feels regret, it is not because Fettes is a quick study, but because he is too quick and dangerously
incautious; he pockets the lucre and toasts to the memory of Gray without once considering the
“tragic burden” of the dead (78).
And this brings us to the final scene of the story. The two men order their gig, announce
that they are bound for Peebles, and take off in that direction, but only to turn out their lanterns
and double back to Glencorse in the pitch darkness through the stormy weather (88–89). When
they arrive at the graveyard, they relight one of the lanterns, begin their abhorred task, and within
twenty minutes reach the coffin, at which point Macfarlane, who has hurt his hand on a stone,
flings it carelessly over his head. The stone breaks the lantern, which falls down the steep cliff at
the edge of the graveyard, leaving the two medical assistants alone with the coffin in the black of
49
night, the rain now marching with the wind (89).
40
Because they are so near to completion, they
decide to continue working rather than retrieve the other lantern, and somehow they manage to
exhume the coffin, break it open, insert the body in the dripping sack, carry it to the gig, and
slowly make their way back to the main road (89).
Similar to the heat wave in “Thrawn Janet,” the stormy night of the expedition has a
strong pathetic affect on Fettes. With the corpse between the two men on the bumpy carriage ride
on the way back to the city, Fettes believes “some unnatural miracle has been accomplished, that
some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear of their unholy burden
that the dogs were howling” (90). Macfarlane soon has the same suspicion—“for God’s sake
let’s have a light”—and he stops the gig, lights the second lantern, and stands motionless before
“A nameless dread . . . swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body,” while “a fear that was
meaningless, a horror of what could not be” is mounting in Fettes’s brain (91). Macfarlane insists
on seeing the dead woman’s face:
And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the sack and drew
down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear upon the dark, well-moulded
features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams
by both of these young men. A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own
side into the roadway; the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse, terrified
by this unusual commotion, bounded and went off towards Edinburgh at the gallop,
bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig, the body of the long dead and long
dissected Gray. (91)

With the supernatural twist at the end of “The Body Snatcher,” Stevenson superimposes
the familiar countenance of Gray onto the unfamiliar countenance of the farmer’s wife, and thus,
reminds us of the countless “unfriended relics of humanity” whose humanity Fettes has
neglected to consider (78). Furthermore, because of the significance of the name Gray to the
West Port murders—it is the name of Burke’s lodgers who finally put an end to the murders

40
Stevenson uses “lantern” as a metaphor for the conscience in “Lay Morals” (204), but of course the lantern
represents the Enlightenment more generally.
50
when they alerted the police about the suspicious behavior of Burke and Hare—Stevenson
suggests that Fettes continues to be haunted by Gray because he has continued to evade taking
responsibility for his choice to not be a neighbor to Jane Galbraith and the eleven others whose
murders he would have prevented had he chosen to intervene.
41
But it is not as if, years later,
Fettes is unaware of his moral shortcomings; quite to the contrary, he seems to display a strange
pride in them. After Fettes recovers from the initial surprise that there is a Dr. Macfarlane from
London visiting a patient at the George, he says:
“This man, perhaps, may have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! hear
me speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you not? But
no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he’d stood in my shoes; but the
brains”—with a rattling fillip on his bald head—“the brains were clear and active; and I
saw and I made no deductions.” (74)
42

We can hear an echo of the young Fettes in the old man as he represents himself as a lion, with
more courage maybe than Voltaire, for experiencing the irrational and still refusing to renounce
his atheism. The irony is that Fettes has nonetheless sacrificed his entire life—he is fettered to
his belief in nothing.
43
Even as he begins his confession, he quiets his conscience, as if this could
betray him, rather than the other way around.
In the conclusion of “The Body Snatcher,” Stevenson calls for a reckoning with the past;
or, metaphorically speaking, a dead reckoning, in which we evaluate the distance between
Enlightenment rationality and what Fettes calls “that old gallery of curiosities” (88), otherwise

41
The Grays refused to accept a bribe from Burke’s partner, Nelly M’Dougal, with Mr. Gray exclaiming, “God
forbid that I should be worth money for dead people!” (Roughead 38). Therefore, their actions undermine
Lonsdale’s attempt to use Burke and Hare’s exceptional depravity as indicative of the laboring classes in general
when he describes the Old Town as a place where “Human beings so lost to shame and natural feeling would have
sold the corpse of their neighbours, and as readily that of their nearest relative, for a few bottles of whisky” (100).
Unlike Knox’s biographer, Roughead praises the honorable couple: “Humanity and the cause of justice owe a deep
debt of gratitude to Gray and his wife for their incorruptible integrity. Had they succumbed to the bribery of their
irregular relatives or to the blandishments of M’Dougal, who knows how long the hideous traffic might have gone
on unchecked or unpunished” (39).
42
In other words, Fettes still maintains the ability to arrange the story in his mind so he can look back on events
with an unhealthy pride (86).
43
I use “fettered” in reference to the fable “The House of Eld,” likely drafted in 1874 (Swearingen, The Prose
Writing 15), in which Stevenson explores the fetters of (un)belief.
51
known as the religious morality of previous generations.
44
Viewed dialogically with “Thrawn
Janet,” Stevenson stages a convergence between the past and the present when he moves the
narrative from Edinburgh to Glencorse—valley (glen) of the dead (corse=corpse)—a rustic
lowland neighborhood that “Time has little changed” (86).
45
By bringing the story within the
vicinity of the Pentland Hills, and thus seventeenth-century Covenanting history, and then
staging a supernatural miracle worthy of that period but instead inspired by an early-nineteenth-
century urban legend about body-snatching anatomists, Stevenson challenges the tendency to
view the Enlightenment as a major milestone in the so-called progress of history. More
important, Stevenson demonstrates the exigency of an ethics—a lay morals if you will—that
falls outside of fashion and is responsible to the neighbor, the one within and the many without.

44
In navigation, this is the “estimation of a ship’s position from the distance run by the log and the courses
steered by the compass, with corrections for current, leeway, etc., but without astronomical observations.
Hence dead latitude n. (q.v.), that computed by dead reckoning” (“dead reckoning,” n.).
45
Ruth Richardson, who alerted me to the meaning of Glencorse, explains that though the name of the
churchyard may seem like a confection, it is in fact real. Originally Glencross—a much less suggestive name—the
place was quite important to Stevenson: “Less than a year before his death in 1894, he wrote from Samoa asking a
friend to say a prayer for him there, ‘on the right-hand bank just where the road goes down into the water . . . shut
your eyes, and if I don’t appear to you! well, it can’t be helped’” (“The art of medicine” 413).

52
Chapter Two: The Traveling Companion or, The Legend of Two Brothers, Jekyll & Hyde

“. . . at the old Savile Club, in Savile Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking-rooms.
Here, or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was Two Men.”

–Andrew Lang
1

“A Chapter on Dreams” (1888) begins with a reflection on the precarious footing of the
past and our inability to distinguish which of our remembered experiences are what we call true,
and which a dream.
2
Building upon his assertion in “Lay Morals” that “man is twofold at least . .
. in the same body with him there dwell other powers tributary but independent” (202),
Stevenson declares that memory, the very thing we rely on to know ourselves and guide us, is
uncertain:
our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which these senses
were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a last night’s dream, to some
incontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood,
not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. . . .
Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived longer and
more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they claim they were still active;
and among the treasures of memory that all men review for their amusement, these count
in no second place the harvests of their dreams. (153–54)

To illustrate how it is that one might learn to actively engage with non-unitary
consciousness in their sleep, Stevenson tells the story of a vivid dreamer, influenced by history
and literature from a very young age, who as a university student begins “to lead a double life—
one of the day, one of the night—one that he had every reason to believe was the true one,
another that he had no means of proving to be false” (156). Grim Old Town haunts and

1
Andrew Lang, a prolific writer, critic, folklorist, anthropologist, and friend of Stevenson, includes this
anecdote, which occurred about a decade before Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde, in “Recollections of Robert
Louis Stevenson,” Adventures Among Books (1905). I am quoting from Richard Dury’s introduction to the
Edinburgh University Press edition of Jekyll and Hyde, p. xix, which is what I will be using throughout this chapter.
Because Dury also includes explanatory notes, appendixes, and textual notes in this wonderfully annotated edition of
the novella, rather than make a separate entry for each of the sections, I will cite Dury’s name, Jekyll and Hyde, and
the page number.
2
This was Stevenson’s first essay in a series of twelve for Scribner’s, and he sent it in less than a month after
their agreement. It was written in just five days, and was probably inspired by the questions from interviewers in
New York about his method of composition (The Prose Writings 117–18).

53
anonymous city dwellers peopled the student’s dreamscape in which “he brushed by single
persons passing downward—beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy laborourers,
poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women—but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all
single, and all brushing against him as they passed” (157). The seemingly interminable “dream
sequence” clouded the young man’s experience day and night, and leaves him “trembling for his
reason, to the doors of a certain doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to the
common lot of man” (157). Although troubling, this dream-adventure was the pivotal moment in
the man’s metamorphosis into a writer; afterward, he began to train himself to be a more
attentive audience member to his “nocturnal dramas,” and his Brownies, the unseen collaborators
who “manage man’s internal theater,” understand the change as well (159–60). They labor
through the night and set before him “better tales than he could fashion for himself” (161), and
soon, the writer becomes successful.
3

It is near the end of the essay that Stevenson admits that he is the dreamer who became a
professional writer, and confesses that he is unable to determine how much he, Robert Louis
Stevenson, actually contributes to his own success. He thinks that perhaps he is completely
indebted to his Brownies’ creativity and the work that they do while he dreams:
Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself—what I call I, my
conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since
Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank account. . . —I am
sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as
any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that,
by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of
some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked up in a
back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him
getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent adviser . . . I pull back and I cut down . . . dress
the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too . .
. and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on

3
As I will return to shortly, in the story of the dreamer, Stevenson subtly incorporates certain plot elements
from Dr. Jekyll’s first-person narrative within Jekyll and Hyde. For instance, the restorative draught, the Brownies,
and the nocturnal dramas, all overlap with Jekyll’s story; in fact, the young dreamer’s double life in university
involves spending his days in a surgical theater.

54
the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our
common enterprise. (165–66)
4

The writer explains that he will present the genesis of Jekyll and Hyde to exemplify “what part is
done sleeping and what part awake,” and that he will leave the reader to distribute, “at his own
nod”—and I have little doubt the wordplay on “nod” is deliberate—which share of laurels should
go to Stevenson and which to his collaborators (166). Stevenson recounts:
I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that
strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm
the mind of every living creature. I had even written one, The Travelling Companion,
which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent,
and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that
Jekyll had supplanted it. . . . For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of
any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene
afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and
underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and
consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The
meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis,
and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck!
and my Brownies have no rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the
setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the
central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. . . . For the business of the
powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the
Brownies. (166–67)

In the midst of an essay about the role that his non-unitary consciousness, or his “double
life,” plays in his creative process, Stevenson says that he had long been trying to write a story
about the strong sense of man’s “double being,” but his emphasis on the necessity of finding a
body or a vehicle indicates that he is perhaps talking about two different things. Stevenson’s

4
In “Stevenson, Romance, and Evolutionary Psychology” (2005), Julia Reid states that “A Chapter on Dreams”
dramatizes the persistence of pre-civilized states of consciousness, which for Stevenson were integral to the artistic
process, and “furnishes a personal narrative in order to explore the affinities between dreams, myth-making, and the
literary imagination” (222). But the way that Stevenson dramatizes this narrative is also reminiscent of Descartes’s
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); unlike the latter, however, Stevenson’s meditation is inconclusive—
knowledge and selfhood remain uncertain. Perhaps even more than in the “Lay Morals,” Stevenson emphasizes the
plurality of consciousness; the present self is influenced by “our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very
world in which these senses were acted”—with “old” as a reference to both oneself at earlier stages in life and also
to traces of ancestral selves whose memories we inherit. Furthermore, Stevenson stresses the importance of the very
world in which these senses are acted, and thus, he highlights the fact that consciousness is not only plural, but also
permeable to the outside world, and, as the imagery of the young dreamer brushing by single persons passing
downward suggests, other actors in world, despite the alienating urban landscape.

55
early biographer, Graham Balfour, does not seem concerned with reconciling this passage with
Stevenson’s earlier use of the phrase “double life.” Instead, Balfour was interested in reconciling
competing accounts of novella’s genesis, and thus his reading of this passage conforms to Fanny
Osbourne’s assertion that the novella is a moral allegory: “A subject much in his [Stevenson’s]
thoughts at this time was the duality of man’s nature and the alternation of good and evil; and he
was for a long while casting about for a story to embody this central idea. Out of this frame of
mind had come the somber imagination of ‘Markheim,’ but that was not what he required” (195–
96).
While Stevenson playfully laments his poor luck for being in charge of morality, in no
way does he confirm that Jekyll’s alternation between the characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
signifies the alternation of good and evil. In fact, Stevenson appears to want to distance the
novella from this still-popular interpretation when he mentions only the now-destroyed
manuscript of “The Travelling Companion” as the precursor to Jekyll and Hyde, rather than
Deacon Brodie, or, the Double Life (1880) or “Markheim” (1885), which are usually cited as the
novella’s precursors.
5
Of course, this does not mean that these works did not influence Jekyll and
Hyde; after all, Stevenson begins “A Chapter on Dreams” with the assertion that memory is
uncertain, and thus unreliable. However, the essay’s opener also presents the reader with the first
of several binary constructions (present v. past) that Stevenson introduces in the pages leading up

5
Through his comments about “The Travelling Companion,” then, Stevenson subtly calls into question the
better-known account of Jekyll and Hyde’s genesis provided by his wife in two important ways. The first is that
whereas Stevenson talks of “The Travelling Companion” as Jekyll and Hyde’s forerunner, Fanny writes: “my
husband was deeply impressed by a paper he read in a French scientific journal on sub-consciousness. This article,
combined with his memories of Deacon Brodie, gave the germ of the idea that afterwards developed into the play,
was used again in the story of Markheim, and finally in a hectic fever following a hemorrhage of the lungs,
culminated in the dream of Jekyll and Hyde” (qtd. in Dury, “Crossing the Bounds” 237). The second is that
Stevenson mentions burning the manuscript of “The Travelling Companion,” rather than the earliest draft of Jekyll
and Hyde. In Fanny’s version, which is corroborated by her son Lloyd, Stevenson famously burned the latter
immediately after Fanny told him he failed to write the story as an allegory—“Jekyll’s nature was bad all through,
and the Hyde change was worked only for the sake of a disguise” (Balfour 197). Whether or not Stevenson did,
indeed, destroy the earliest manuscript of Jekyll and Hyde, it seems we will never know. He did, however, burn
“The Travelling Companion.”

56
to his recollection of Jekyll and Hyde’s genesis. And though the novella certainly engages with
various types of duality, including conscious v. subconscious and body v. mind—both of which
Stevenson touches upon through his humorous reference to Descartes—the fact remains that in
his comments about the novella’s genesis, Stevenson refers solely to Hyde taking the powder and
undergoing what we know to be a physical change (167). Therefore, with the help of Andrew
Lang’s recollection about Stevenson’s decade-old idea for a tale about “a Man who was Two
Men,” we might tentatively conclude that by “man’s double being,” Stevenson simply means the
supernatural element that enables one man to have two bodies, and that this type of double being
connects Jekyll and Hyde to “The Travelling Companion,” which Stevenson began in August
1881, the summer he wrote “Thrawn Janet” and “The Body Snatcher,” and worked on
intermittently until 1886 or 1887 (Swearingen, The Prose Writings 62).
I begin my discussion of Jekyll and Hyde with “A Chapter on Dreams” because
Stevenson’s playful narrative about his metamorphosis from a tormented dreamer to a
professional writer who fears he might merely be a scribe for some Familiar he keeps locked up
in a back garret (166) is revealing of the narrative strategy in “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of
the Case,” the tenth and final chapter of the novella. Stevenson ironically echoes Jekyll’s written
confession in a way that calls our attention to how Jekyll compounds the meaning of his “double
existence” just as carefully as he compounds the elements in his transforming draught (65), and
the result is a carefully constructed narrative of a morally divided consciousness—indeed, it is
Jekyll who presents us with a good-v.-evil morality tale and he uses the various other meanings
of a double existence to support it. And because “A Chapter on Dreams” also underscores the
connections between Jekyll and Hyde and Stevenson’s early writing that we discussed in the

57
previous chapter, it helped me to recognize another reason why Jekyll’s statement continues to
exert such a strong influence over readers.
Jekyll’s confession derives much of its power from a little Puritanic horror about two
unsisterly sisters whose abode is bisected by a chalk line. The difference is that Stevenson’s first-
person narrator pursues the alternative ending only gestured to in “Legends,” and Jekyll makes it
seem as though after the white powder does its dividing magic, the two brothers go their own
separate ways. But, of course, they do not separate—the two brothers are traveling companions.
6

Therefore, “A Chapter on Dreams” helps us to untangle Stevenson’s tale about a man’s double
being and Jekyll’s legend about his deeply divided consciousness that lies within, which in turn
sheds some light on how the novella functions as a puzzle text. Richard Dury explains:
Rather than an allegory, JH could be seen as a kind of puzzle text: a fantastic “weird tale”
with elements of detective, science-fiction and sensational tale, containing many
signifying elements of multiple and changing values. Like a puzzle, the text forces the
reader to interpret, to test ambiguities and recognize patterns. It resembles the labyrinth in
being a fascinating structure in which the interpreter has to understand ambiguous
situations while lacking a clear view of the whole. The text also has affinities with the
verbal puzzle of the paradox, since the central enigma is that Jekyll and Hyde are two
characters and one character, different and the same: they form a clear dualistic
opposition yet are also seen as a complementary pair making a unity, so that boundaries
disappear and fixed meaning (based on oppositions) is challenged. (xxvii)

While I am not proposing that the legend of the two sisters is a key that can unlock the
wonderfully complex puzzle that is Jekyll and Hyde, I do believe the legend helps us to situate
the novella within a succession Stevenson’s Gothic neighbor plots.
In “On Morality,” Stevenson states that “If there be anything we can condemn (to-day
and in our race) without an afterthought or hesitation, it is the wanton infliction of suffering”
(268). Dr. Jekyll, a fellow who does what they call good (11)—a man who says he “labored in
the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering” (58,

6
In “Legends,” Stevenson writes, “You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether from lack of
means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep house together where they were” (70).

58
emphasis added)—would surely agree, and yet, he has little concern for the world outside his
window and the suffering he might bring to it using his Hyde-disguise. Jekyll is concerned with
his own suffering, and his dazzling confession about the polar twins struggling within his
agonized womb of consciousness quite successfully turns the reader’s attention away from the
fact that Jekyll places a being he describes as “inherently malign and villainous” in his own
“separate” abode (63, 62)—first his own body, and later, his own house.
Even when Jekyll admits to an act of cruelty to a child and to the murder of Sir Danvers
Carew (64, 67), it is surprisingly easy to forget that he is right beneath the Hyde-disguise because
his victims are never in focus, though they are within plain view. For this reason, Jekyll and
Hyde is Stevenson’s most advanced neighbor plot; it puts the reader into an uncomfortable
ethical relation to someone who has no regard for others. Jekyll tries to convince us otherwise,
but Stevenson invites us to see the world through the eyes of “the man who has no sensitive need
of public countenance, the man who offends his neighbours without pain”—the man who is “of
the blood of criminals” (“On Morality” 273).
Years before Jekyll writes his “Full Statement of the Case,” which is also his suicide
note, Jekyll wrote a will, in which he stated his desire to be free from responsibility quite clearly.
The document has long been the eyesore of Mr. Utterson, who is Jekyll’s lawyer and close
friend, because the will
provided not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, MD, DCL, LLD, FRS, &c.,
all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward
Hyde,” but that in case of Dr.Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any
period exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step into the said
Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free from any burden or obligation,

59
beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor’s household. (13,
emphasis added)
7

Jekyll and Hyde are one person and co-heirs to death (72), so the clause—in (the strange) case
Jekyll should disappear—is, in truth, the only case in which Hyde could inherit Jekyll’s
possessions. The “without further delay” would ensure that after three months, Jekyll-as-Hyde
would have no legal impediments. Therefore, for Jekyll to include that Hyde should be free from
any burdens or obligations besides providing sums to members of his household appears to be a
superfluous detail. But all the more revealing of Jekyll’s unparalleled desire to be free from
neighborly responsibility is Stevenson’s choice of the idiomatic expression “to step into the
shoes of,” which not only highlights Jekyll’s solipsism—he desires to step into the shoes of
himself—but it also emphasizes how Jekyll has failed to imagine what it might be like to walk in
another person’s shoes, particularly the shoes of one of his victims.
8
Mr. Enfield and the maid
each describe Hyde trampling on his victims—the little girl on the street and Sir Danvers Carew,
respectively (9, 25)—and therefore, these shoes are a direct link to Jekyll-as-Hyde’s crimes. Or,
to put it idiomatically, Jekyll’s shoes are his smoking gun; however, it is a smoking gun that is
very well hidden, thanks to Stevenson’s wonderfully labyrinthine novella.
The first eight chapters of the novella are focalized through Mr. Utterson, and because the
middle-aged lawyer is interested in investigating the mysterious figure of Mr. Hyde, these
sections resemble a detective narrative and chronicle only important developments in the

7
Although the narrator tells us that Jekyll wrote the will because Utterson refused to lend his assistance to
something so preposterous, Dury is correct to point out that when “the free indirect reading of the will and its formal
legal language is interrupted by the substitution of a colloquial ‘step into someone’s shoes’ . . . we cannot tell if this
comes from an indignant Utterson or a cool narrator, who, like Enfield, has a taste for slang” (Dury, Jekyll and Hyde
35). But no matter who is speaking, the irony of this expression remains.
8
This is from the OED: “to be in (another person’s) shoes: to be in his position or place. Chiefly in negative
form = in his unenviable condition or plight. to place (a person) in the shoes of (another person): to give (him) the
position vacated by (another). to step into the shoes of (another person): to occupy the position vacated by him. to
wait for dead men’s shoes: to wait for the death of a person with the expectancy of succeeding to his possessions or
office” (“shoe,” n.1k).

60
mystery. The event that initiates the narrative and Mr. Utterson’s investigation is Mr. Enfield’s
“Story of the Door,” and though it is unclear how much time has passed since he witnessed
Hyde’s “abominable” behavior (22), it seems to have happened a year ago, perhaps even several
years ago. Likewise, although it is difficult to say for certain, there are enough time indicators to
determine that the period between Mr. Enfield’s “Story of the Door” and Henry Jekyll’s “Last
Night” spans at least one year. The last two sections of the novella are firsthand posthumous
accounts from Dr. Lanyon and Dr. Jekyll, respectively, and their nonlinear chronology not only
fills in gaps in Utterson’s investigation but also extends the novella’s general timeline. Because
Jekyll and Hyde contains three separate narrative voices (Utterson, Lanyon, and Jekyll) in three
different respective styles (investigatory, testimonial, confessional), one must read the ten
sections of the novella like a palimpsest to discover this rather disconcerting and surprisingly
unacknowledged fact: for roughly a decade, and quite possibly longer, Jekyll successfully used
the Hyde-disguise unbeknownst to anyone but himself.
The dates provided in the fragmentary Notebook Draft, which is the earliest existing draft
of the novella, make Jekyll’s prolonged use of the transforming draught explicit. While the
Notebook Draft and the subsequent Printer’s Copy—also missing several sections and pages—
should be considered apart from the novella and as texts in their own right, they contain several
edits that do not contradict the published edition of Jekyll and Hyde but rather highlight the

61
subtle nuances that Stevenson labored to refine.
9
By comparing the published edition to the
Notebook Draft, we can see that with a couple exceptions—the most important being Dr.
Lanyon’s reference to the “more than ten years” that had passed since Dr. Jekyll’s “unscientific
balderdash” created a rift between them (12)—Stevenson purposely obscures the novella’s
chronology by eliminating exact dates and relying on vague words like “long” and “many” to
indicate elapsed time. For instance, whereas in the published edition of Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll’s
will “had long been the lawyer’s eyesore” (14), the Notebook Draft reads “For ten years, he
[Utterson] had kept that preposterous document in his safe” (33), which supports the implication

9
The manuscript drafts were first reprinted in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years (1988), and in
the introductory essay, William Veeder explains that Stevenson took advantage of the galley proofs to make last-
minute alterations and hence, the fragmentary Printer’s Copy is different than the first published edition (3–4),
though more similar to the latter than the Notebook Draft. Because the manuscripts were also appended in the
Edinburgh University Press edition of Jekyll and Hyde, I have decided to use the page numbers of the original drafts
in my citation, as these page numbers are included in both reprints. But it should be noted that Dury argues that what
Veeder refers to as the Notebook Draft contains pages from two different notebook drafts, which he distinguishes as
ND1 and ND2, and he also refers to the Printer’s Copy as the final manuscript, or MS (111).
A note on the timeline: the most significant clue to Jekyll’s lengthy career in the Notebook Draft is in
Lanyon’s narrative. In reference to Jekyll’s notebook, in which the doctor records how much and how often he
drinks the tinctures, Lanyon writes: “The dates in the version book covered many years, fifteen I think or twenty, but
I observed that they had ceased some months before that day, or about April 1884” (67–68). By the Printer’s Copy,
Lanyon’s observation no longer contains the same amount of detail; he recalls, “The book was an ordinary version-
book and contained little but a series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries
ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly” (50).
Because the Notebook Draft is so fragmentary—and the published edition so purposely vague, and at times
inconsistent—it is difficult to say with absolute certainty that Stevenson did not significantly alter the general
chronology as he revised; however, the pages of the earliest draft that do exist suggest that Stevenson keeps the
chronology largely intact. The only discrepancy in trying to reconstruct the timeline of the published edition based
on the dates in the Notebook Draft arises when one tries to reconcile Jekyll’s age—at the start of the published
chapter “Dr. Jekyll was Quite at Ease,” the narrator says that Jekyll is fifty (21)—with the two key years mentioned
in the Notebook Draft, although this discrepancy of a few years could easily have been there from the very start.
Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing; the early chapters of the Notebook Draft are missing, and p. 13, the first
and only page of this chapter in the Printer’s Copy, ends just before the narrator would have mentioned Jekyll’s age.
It is for this reason that I state that Jekyll used the tincture for roughly ten years rather than between fifteen and
twenty.

62
that Lanyon and Jekyll’s falling out more than ten years ago corresponds with Jekyll’s discovery
of the transforming draught.
10

Regardless of the exact number of years that have passed since Jekyll composed his will,
the ten years mentioned in the Notebook Draft nonetheless prompt us to think about what “long”
might signify, and to question Jekyll’s stated reason for designating Hyde as his benefactor.
Jekyll explains that he drew up the will “so that if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll,
I could enter on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss” (63), which seems false
considering that Jekyll uses the Hyde-disguise for the very purpose of ensuring that nothing
would befall him in his own person. Therefore, Jekyll’s will not only suggests that the doctor
recognized early on that he might desire to live permanently outside the “bonds of obligation”
(60), it also hints at the possibility that he long understood the potential for his Hyde-side to
become dominant.
The Notebook Draft also reveals that Stevenson decided that Jekyll-as-narrator should be
incredibly vague about his illicit “appetites” and what his nocturnal pursuits entail (66); although

10
The mention of the will in the Notebook Draft is connected to the most substantial difference, in terms of
content, between the early version(s) of the novella and the Printer’s Copy: in the former, Jekyll’s murder victim is a
“bad fellow” named Mr. Lemsome, and in the latter, it is the apparently venerable Sir Danvers Carew, M.P. (33).
The passage concerning the will is on an anomalous page in the Notebook Draft—one of the two canceled leaves
that Dury believes probably correspond to “a completely different and earlier draft or phase of the work,” and which
he refers to as Notebook Draft 1 (161n.7)—when Mr. Lemsome appeals to Utterson for help and the lawyer accepts
him as a client despite his better judgment. The full sentence reads: “For ten years, he [Utterson] had kept that
preposterous document in his safe; and here was the first independent sign that such a man as Mr. Hyde existed—
here, from the lips of a creature who had come to him bleating for help under the most ignoble and deserved
misfortunes, he heard the name of the man to whom Henry Jekyll had left everything and whom he named his
‘friend and benefactor’” (33).
While Carew is also one of Utterson’s clients, there is no scene in which the two men meet, nor is there any
indication that Carew had any run-ins with Hyde before the fatal night they cross paths in the street. But the other
mention of Lemsome, which is in the final chapter of what Dury refers to as the Notebook Draft 2, indicates that as
far as Jekyll’s statement is concerned, the Lemsome murder and the Carew murder function in much the same way;
they both happened some months (five months in the early draft, two in the later) after Jekyll experiences his first
involuntary transformation. Based on the fact that there is no mention of Enfield throughout the Notebook Draft—
for example, while the first chapter is missing, in the final one, when Jekyll refers to what we can easily recognize as
the trampling scene (87–88), he makes no reference to Utterson’s kinsman—it appears that Stevenson may have
decided to introduce Enfield around the same time that he substituted Carew for Lemsome. By the Printer’s Copy, it
is Enfield who gives Utterson the first independent sign that Hyde existed, and who Jekyll recalls recognizing from
the night that Hyde injured the young girl.

63
the early Jekyll does not specify his transgressions, he makes their criminality explicit and
underlines the likelihood that they are of a sexual nature. While popular interpretations and
adaptations of the novella tend to reinsert the sexual nature of Jekyll’s indiscretion back into the
story because sexual repression is such a common theme in Victorian narratives, few readings
account for the cruelty and violence that likely would have characterized Jekyll’s long criminal
career. Although Jekyll and Hyde is a text that insists on its own indeterminacy, one should not
mistake Jekyll’s decision to represent his appetite with ambiguous language as either an
indication of its innocuousness or as proof of what Jekyll identifies as his disproportionate
feelings of remorse, especially in light of the parallels that Stevenson draws between Jekyll and
the anonymous doctor of Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which was published in
the summer of 1885, shortly before Stevenson had the dream that inspired the novella. But
though Jekyll’s Hyde-disguise and solitary existence allow for his extreme unneighborliness, the
doctor is also protected by the unspoken bonds of his small community of similarly respectable
gentlemen, which becomes all the more clear when viewed retrospectively of Jekyll’s statement.
In the published edition of the novella, Jekyll begins his confession by affirming his place
among the morally righteous: “I was born in 18— to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among
my fellow-men . . . with every guarantee of an honorouable and distinguished future” (58).
However, he continues,
the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the
happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to
carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the
public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years
of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in
the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. (58)

64
Although Jekyll admits to disguising his faulty disposition by wearing a more than commonly
grave countenance, he nonetheless tries to “present his life as morally neutral by deceptively
manipulating the meaning of the word ‘duplicity,’ which itself means ‘deception’” (Dury, Jekyll
and Hyde 102). For instance, Jekyll continues:
Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but . . . I
regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the
exacting nature of his aspiration than any particular degradation in my faults that made
me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me
those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature. (58)

Jekyll also tries to extract the negative connotation of “double-dealer” when he declares:
“Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in
dead earnest” (58).
Although Jekyll’s confession in the Notebook Draft begins much the same way, it
demonstrates that Stevenson’s editorial changes involved “a steady occlusion of outré materials”
(Veeder, “The Texts” 10). In the early version, Jekyll offers a complete year of birth, 1830,
which is already deleted by the Printer’s Copy (76), and instead of an “impatient gaiety of
disposition,” Jekyll says, “From a very early age . . . I became in secret the slave of disgraceful
pleasures” (76). Moreover, the early Jekyll elaborates on what his commitment to a profound
duplicity of life entails:
On one side, I was what you have known me, a man of distinction, immersed in toils,
open to generous sympathies, never slow to befriend struggling virtue, never backward in
an honourable cause; on the other, as soon as night had fallen and I could shake off my
friends, the iron hand of indurated habit plunged me once again into the mire of my vices.

65
I will trouble you with these no further than to say that they were at once criminal in the
sight of the law and abhorrent in themselves. (77, emphasis added)
11

With “on one side . . . on the other” bracketing the other binary constructions in this passage, the
chalk line bisecting Jekyll’s consciousness is legible. Although Stevenson removed this section
by the next draft, in the published version, Jekyll repeatedly describes his consciousness as
severed and divided, and thus, he nonetheless conditions the reader to envision that these
diametrically opposed natures within him can be neatly separated into the good Jekyll, on the one
side, and the evil Hyde, on the other.
The influence of the legend of the two sisters is the most apparent in Jekyll’s description
of his dual consciousness and his prediction that man will ultimately be known as a polity of
unneighborly denizens:
And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the
mystic and the transcendental, re-acted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of
the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my
intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly
one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass
beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I
hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious,
incongruous, and independent denizens. (58–59)

But though Jekyll admits the limits of his current state of knowledge, he nonetheless submits a
theory of consciousness that, unlike Stevenson’s, posits the self is knowable, “It was on the
moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality
of man. I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I

11
As Jekyll’s description indicates, “criminal” could refer to an action that is an infringement of the law but not
harmful to another. And, as many critics have noted, Stevenson certainly allows for the possibility that Jekyll has
homosexual desires, which were deemed criminal to act upon with the passing of the Labouchère Amendment in the
wake of the “Maiden Tribute” (Dury, Jekyll and Hyde xxxi). However, it seems unlikely that Stevenson would have
considered homosexuality criminal based on the criteria he presents in “The Ethics of Crime,” in which the author
rejects both the notion that a simple infringement of the law is automatically criminal, and that whatever shocks the
popular conscience is criminal. He writes, “Crime (to reach the full meaning of the word) should at once break the
letter of the law and offend against the sanctities of life; as matricide, or rape; acts which the law forbids and by
which the public conscience is revolted” (274).

66
could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both” (59). A consciousness
radically both gives way to the possibility of a consciousness radically divided, and it is here that
Jekyll shares his fantasy of his polar twins parting ways:
I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the
separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities,
life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go on his way,
delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could
walk away steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which
he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of
this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous fagots were thus
bound together that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be
continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated? (59)

Jekyll says that he soon began to perceive “the trembling immateriality, the mist-like
transience, of this this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired” (59), which is merely
the “aura and effulgence of certain of the powers” that make up our spirit (60). To dissociate the
incongruent strands of his consciousness, he compounds a tincture that would dethrone these
powers from their supremacy and substitute a second form and countenance (60). Jekyll
“hesitated long” before he puts his theory to test, but after “the temptation of a discovery so
singular and profound at last” overcomes him, he purchases the last necessary ingredient, a
special white salt which he supposedly buys wholesale and in a “large quantity” (60).
With a glow of courage, he drinks off the potion and experiences “a grinding in the
bones, deadly nausea, and horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or
death” (60). But after these pains subside, he becomes “conscious of a heady recklessness, a
current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution to the bonds
of obligation, an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul” (57, emphasis added). Jekyll
immediately understands he has lost in stature, and in order to see himself in a mirror, he must

67
run across the yard and sneak in through the corridor as “a stranger in my own house” (61).
12
In
his room, Jekyll “saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde,” and ascertains that his
evil nature has a somatic expression.
13
Speaking on theory alone—“saying not that which I
know, but that which is probable”—he conjectures Hyde is smaller, slighter, and younger
because in the course of his life, which had been “nine tenths a life of effort, virtue, and control,”
Jekyll’s evil side had been less exercised and much less exhausted (61). He continues:
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and
plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal
side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I
looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap
of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a
livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and
divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was
doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none
could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it,
was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil:
and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. (61)

And thus, Jekyll offers a rather convincing account of how he doubles his initial
discovery of dual consciousness in his subsequent discovery of double being because he views
the body as the material expression of one’s immaterial spirit.
14
Having already recognized the

12
On his way from his laboratory to his house, Jekyll tells us he “could have thought, with wonder,” by the
thought that he was the first of a kind of creature that the constellations had ever been disclosed to in their
unsleeping vigilance (61).
13
In all three drafts of this chapter, this is the first time Jekyll uses the name Edward Hyde. He never discloses
when, exactly, he named his alter ego, but a little later in the Notebook Draft, he provides some commentary about
his selection: “As Edward Hyde (for I had so dubbed my second self—God help me!—in pleasantry), I was secure
of an immunity that never before was attained by a criminal” (86).
14
In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Schopenhauer, and the Power of Will” (1991), Martin Tropp shows the
influence that Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which viewed the mind and body as intimately connected, had on
Stevenson’s novella. In The World as Will and Idea (1818), which was translated into English in 1883,
Schopenhauer argues, “Every true, genuine, immediate act of will is also, at once and immediately, a visible act of
the body. And corresponding to this, every impression upon the body is also . . . at once and immediately an
impression upon the will” (qtd. in Tropp 146), thus implying a transforming power not unlike Jekyll’s potion (146).
But whereas Schopenhauer argues “much of the will is repressed by our conscious mind, yet still exerts a powerful
influence,” Jekyll’s experiments “are more than attempts to release a second self; his bodily transformations are, in
fact, only manifestations of his real intention—to know and control his will” (145–46). For different reasons, Tropp
continues, both Schopenhauer and Cesare Lombrosio—the Victorian authority on criminality—believed “the body
could be read like a document, revealing ancestry and desire, an imprint of the past upon the present. Jekyll strives
further, seeking the power to alter that document at will” (146). Therefore, Tropp says, “Jekyll is obsessed by his
belief that he is a ghost in a machine, striving to make his body serve what Utterson calls ‘that will of yours’” (147).

68
deeply divided good and ill provinces in Henry Jekyll’s composite spirit, he creates a drug that
can voluntarily dethrone the good, and in his new material form, he recognizes his evil side
alone. As Jekyll transitions into the narrative of his story of Jekyll and Hyde, he immediately
tells us that when the drug shook the prisonhouse of his disposition, “my virtue slumbered; my
evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to the occasion; and the thing that was
projected was Edward Hyde” (62). By describing his good v. evil natures as dreaming v. waking
states, and reminding us that Hyde is the physical manifestation of his evil and alert
consciousness, Jekyll subtly entices the reader to imagine that he is is asleep while Hyde does his
bidding.
Jekyll makes a similarly suggestive comparison when, after composing his will and
supplying Hyde with his own Soho house, he says: “And thus fortified, as I supposed, on every
side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position. Men have before hired bravos to
transact their crimes, while their own person or reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that
ever did so for his pleasures” (63). While Jekyll’s person and thus his reputation sit under shelter,
he is not elsewhere; and yet, how easy to imagine that Jekyll is in the elsewhere of a dream world
once he sends forth his unjust twin alone into the world:
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said,
undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they
soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these
excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This
familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure,
was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self;
drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless
like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde;
but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of
conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse;
he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste,
where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience
slumbered. (63)

69
But make no mistake: while virtue and conscience slumber, and person and reputation sit under
shelter, Jekyll-as-Hyde goes forth into the night, “drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any
degree of torture to another.”
For a decade, though likely longer, Jekyll enjoys the perfect alibi. Jekyll preserves his
much valued reputation without fear of detection until that fateful night when the venerable
doctor is implicated in one of Mr. Hyde’s exploits because the latter must use Jekyll’s checkbook
in order to pay damages (64). But even this does not deter the doctor because although there are
several witnesses on the scene, including Utterson’s cousin, Mr. Enfield, who now associates
Jekyll and Hyde, their relationship remains shrouded in mystery, thanks in part to Mr. Enfield’s
rule, “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask” (11). Furthermore, Jekyll simply
eliminates the possibility that this might happen again—for this is when he completes Hyde’s
fictional metamorphosis into an independent subject by furnishing him with his own bank
account (64).
At the end of his confession, Jekyll refers back to the fact that he bought a large amount
of salt from the outset—which he is sure to say had been unpredictable from the start (65)—to
offer an explanation for why his scientific formula fails once this batch of salt runs out: “I am
now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which
lent efficacy to the draught” (73). In retrospect, it seems Jekyll fabricated his own plot device;
granted he runs the risk of slightly diminishing his brilliance by conceding that his initial
experiment may have been successful due to an unknown ingredient, Jekyll’s supposition, which
relies on an accidental impurity, allows him to delicately contradict his initial scientific and
rational theory that Hyde is a natural manifestation of Jekyll’s lower impulses in favor of a non-

70
naturalistic hypothesis that counteracts his inexorable link to the impure creature whom he
ultimately portrays as deformed, hellish, and inorganic (72).
At the very least, Jekyll’s supposed wholesale purchase negates his claim that he ever
truly hesitated to drink the potion in the first place and then, after he tests it just once, falsifies
his self-portrayal as an individual at a “fatal crossroads” (62). In rather crude terms, Jekyll puts
the cart before the horse. But when viewed in the context of Stevenson’s other Gothic
protagonists, Jekyll’s narrative has much greater implications. While Jekyll shares similarities
with several of Stevenson’s earlier Gothic characters, he is first and foremost a descendent of
Reverend Soulis from “Thrawn Janet” and Jekyll’s apparent self-consciousness makes him a
powerful and dangerous revenant. Unlike Soulis, who seems to truly fear the otherness within,
Jekyll professes to the duality and potential plurality of human consciousness, but in the end, he
appeals to contemporary fears of atavism and even to a scientific brand of supernaturalism to
effectively explain (and condemn) Hyde.
15
In the Notebook Draft, Stevenson actually makes the
connection between Janet M’Clour and Edward Hyde clear-cut when Dr. Lanyon describes the
latter as a small man with a “slight shortening of some of the cords of the neck which tilted his

15
For a detailed analysis of Jekyll and Hyde in a scientific context, see Mighall’s A Geography of Victorian
Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (1999).

71
head upon one side” (69).
16
Therefore, Stevenson does not simply turn “the discourses centering
on degeneration, atavism, and criminality back on the professional classes that produced them,”
as Stephen Arata claims (qtd. in Turnbull 244); by drawing a parallel between seventeenth-
century fears of witchcraft and nineteenth-century fears of devolution that influenced
contemporary criminology, Stevenson also exposes and critiques the historical continuity of
discourses that seek to categorize and expel the in(fra)human.
But in truth, for the sake of continuous history and as a record of his commitment to
advancing the field of transcendental science, Jekyll desires to keep his sovereign dual
subjectivity intact, which accounts for the twist and turns in his story.
17
This is why Jekyll does
not deny his dual consciousness, nor that he is Hyde’s progenitor. Jekyll also admits to the

16
While this is the most explicit connection, Stevenson draws parallels between Hyde and Janet—or, to be more
precise, between the ways they each are described by those who come into contact with them—throughout Jekyll
and Hyde. For instance, in “The Story of the Door,” Enfield tells Utterson that his extreme hatred of Hyde is shared
by everyone who has gathered on the street, and his recollection of the “harpies” is not only misogynistic, but also
reminiscent of the reaction of the goodwives to Janet: “we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for
they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a
kind of black, sneering coolness—frightened too, I could see that—but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan” (8). In
“The Last Night,” Poole refers to the person in Jekyll’s cabinet as a thing—“that thing was not my master, and
there’s the truth” (41)—and when Poole tries to express the uncanny feeling, or “the something queer” about Hyde
that everyone who meets him experiences, he echoes Soulis’s description of the feeling he has first in the presence
of the black man and then Janet. Poole explains to Utterson: “I don’t know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this:
that you felt it in your marrow kind of cold and thin” (42). And although Stevenson decided against Dr. Lanyon’s
observation of Hyde’s thrawn neck, Dr. Lanyon nonetheless echoes the narrator of “Thrawn Janet” when he writes
how Hyde responds right before he checks to see if the cabinet drawer Dr. Lanyon retrieves contains all the
necessary ingredients to compound the tincture: “He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart; I
could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew
alarmed both for his life and reason” (52). Recall that in “Thrawn Janet” after Soulis demands that she renounce
Satan, “she gave a girn that fairly frichtit them that saw her, an’ they could hear her teeth play dirl thegether in her
chafts” (413).
17
Stevenson reveals the correlative relationship between continuous history and sovereign subjectivity in a
manner that is predictive of Michel Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1971), Foucault states:
“Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that
everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will dispense nothing without
restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject—in the form of historical consciousness—
will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by
difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the
continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the
two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions
are never more than moments of consciousness. In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the
nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of
anthropology and humanism” (12, emphasis added).

72
Carew murder, but the doctor nonetheless displaces culpability in his interpretation of the events
leading up to it. He explains that he had refrained from using the tincture for two months after he
underwent an involuntary transformation in his sleep—he went to bed as Jekyll and woke up as
Hyde (64)—and that his abstinence had an unanticipated side-effect: “I was conscious, even
when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill” (67). Jekyll
determines this is what causes Hyde’s moral insanity, which he can describe with scientific
objectivity, as if from afar; but his “unhappy victim” is hardly considered at all. Carew is
compared to a “a plaything” and “the unresisting body,” and not mentioned again:
It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with
which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare at least, before God, no
man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and
that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a
plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts, by which
even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among
temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I mauled
the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had
begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the
heart by a cold thrill of terror. (64)
18

But Jekyll actually falls twice—the second time is in January, roughly three months later.
He explains that at first, he feels resolved to maintain good conduct in the future in order to
redeem the past, and makes a direct appeal to Utterson, and thus, the reader: “You know yourself
how earnestly in the last months of last year, I labored to relieve suffering; you know how much
was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself.” But his lower
side, “so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license” (68). Jekyll
assures Mr. Utterson, his addressee, that he never dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; he says “it was
in my own person, that I once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an
ordinary secret sinner, that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation” (69). But Jekyll had

18
When Jekyll-as-Hyde returns to the Soho house after the murder, “Hyde had a song upon his lips as he
compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man,” which likens him to Fettes (67–8).

73
already said that he feared Hyde’s growing stature, and that he might be permanently
overthrown—“All things therefore seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my
original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (66).
The following day while he sits in Regent’s Park, “the animal within me licking the
chops of memory,”
After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with
other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the
very moment of the vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the
most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn the
faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a
greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. (68,
emphasis added)

What is interesting about this transformation is that it happens after he shifts from thinking about
the previous night. While Jekyll acknowledges his vainglorious thought, he does not seem to
consider that this is the thought, or really the desire, that leads to the involuntary transformation.
Regardless of what memory or desire, if any, triggers the transformation, the irony remains:
Jekyll is now “the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murder, thrall to the
gallows” (69). Fortunately for Jekyll, Hyde’s love of life inspires the weaker brother to rise to the
occasion and make the necessary arrangements to have his drugs taken to Dr. Lanyon’s house.
But, Jekyll tells us, “that child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and
anger,” and on his way to Lanyon’s, “a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He
smote her in the face, and she fled” (71, emphasis added).
In “Doctor Lanyon’s Narrative,” we witness a frenzied, Mephistophelian Hyde from
Lanyon’s perspective as he tempts Lanyon with forbidden knowledge. But Hyde is speaking in
Jekyll’s tongue—Jekyll invokes theological language concerning creation and the fall throughout
his statement—and he is also speaking on behalf of Jekyll:

74
Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand
and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiousity too
much command of you? . . . . As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, neither
richer nor wise, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be
counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new
province of knowledge and now new avenues of fame and power shall be laid open to
you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to
stagger the unbelief of Satan. (56)

Before he drinks the tincture, Hyde-as-Jekyll declares: “Lanyon, remember your vows: what
follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the
most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you
who have derided your superiors—behold!” (56, emphasis added).
While it is not a surprise that Jekyll declines to report what his hellish twin said to
Lanyon, particularly because Hyde reveals himself through Jekyll’s language, it is remarkable
that after Hyde takes the tincture and transforms before Lanyon’s eyes, Jekyll does not even
notice the affect it has on Lanyon. Just the night before, Jekyll had hosted a dinner for Lanyon
and Utterson—the latter recalls that “the face of the host had looked from one to the other as in
the old days when the trio were inseparable friends” (34)—and tonight, he gives one of his two
old friends a shock that ultimately kills him, and this is all that Jekyll writes:
When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old friend perhaps affected me
somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with
which I looked back upon these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the
fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon’s
condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own
house and got into bed (71).
19

19
But the horror does not last long. He continues: “I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and
profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning
shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not
of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and
close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of
hope” (71).
The fragmentary Notebook Draft stops mid-sentence in an early version of this passage (Dury 162): “You know
already what occurred. Lanyon threw me off from him with horror; it scarcely moved me; I was still so full of my
immediate joy. I was already so conscious of the perpetual doom that hung above my head; and when I returned
home, carrying with me my precious drugs” (103).

75
In his own account of the evening, Lanyon recalls: “As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled
to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on without a start of horror”
(71).
Jekyll is extraordinarily indifferent to everyone but himself, whether or not he wears his
Hyde-disguise. While Utterson’s recollection about the reunion dinner suggests that perhaps the
doctor was not always so self-centered, many years have passed since the doctor began to
organize his life around an extreme desire for privacy. Situated on the grounds of an old surgical
theater, Jekyll’s house is located at the corner of a busy London bystreet and a formerly elegant
square. While much has been said about the significance of the dual façade of Jekyll’s home and
how it reflects the distinct somatic expressions of his dual personality, I am instead interested in
how the architectural features of his house provide Jekyll with a notably isolated existence in a
crowded metropolis. In the absence of nearby neighbors and under the care of faithful servants,
Jekyll can come and go as he pleases and as who he pleases, and with the Hyde-disguise, he is
not even required to use the laboratory door: “I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde
(whom I described) was to have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to
parry mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second character” (63).
Jekyll’s seclusion is crucial to the plot and I would argue that this is one reason why
Stevenson chose to set the tale in London instead of Edinburgh, in spite of the many
characteristics the novella’s London shares with the author’s native city, including the anatomy
theater in his backyard.
20
Unlike Edinburgh, London resisted the advent of apartment-style living
in favor of single-family homes that maintained privacy and insularity so vital to the Victorian
domestic ideal. In Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

20
The other reasons are that Stevenson composed Jekyll and Hyde while residing with his wife Fanny in the
English coastal town of Bournemouth, which is 169 km southwest of London and, as I will elaborate later, was
influenced by the city’s current affairs.

76
(1999), Sharon Marcus explains the prevailing domestic ideology dictated that “The home was to
be a physically enclosed refuge that isolated the inhabitants from contact with other households,
the street, and the city’s public spaces and institutions” (90). While Jekyll’s self-enclosed home
allows the doctor a dangerous lack of social awareness—I use this word at the most basic level—
that Jekyll houses, literally, his twin in his own geographically distinct, and self-enclosed abode,
highlights the scariest aspect of his whole enterprise: Jekyll depends on his travelling companion
precisely because his pleasures require him to be out in the world.
Jekyll insists that until he murders Carew, his vices are ordinary and that he is no
different from his neighbors (although he is perhaps better than them). He claims that it is only
his exceptional sense of remorse that motivates his scientific experiments and his employment of
the Hyde-disguise. But while we cannot know for certain because Jekyll refrains from specifying
his vices, it is difficult to accept that they are ordinary, especially when one considers that
Jekyll’s desire for privacy extends beyond his living situation.
Although subtle, the text presents us with several clues as to why he requires Hyde. For
instance, in “Story of the Door,” the first chapter of Jekyll and Hyde, we receive our first
impression of Hyde as a man who indifferently tramples over a small girl in the street. Even after
Enfield catches the perpetrator and threatens to turn the incident into a scandal, Hyde makes no
effort to conceal that the only reason he agrees to recompense the family is to avoid a scene and
the mere fact that Hyde wishes to protect his untarnished name from scandal exposes the shared
conscientiousness, or lack thereof, of Jekyll.
21
Then, in the final chapter, Jekyll confirms that
Hyde’s public disregard for a child might indicate the potential brutality of his private dealings

21
Jekyll and Hyde share the same memory but this is all that Jekyll says of the girl: “An act of cruelty to a child
aroused against me the anger of a passer by whom I recognized the other day in the person of your kinsman” (64,
emphasis added). Of course, the only reason Jekyll recognizes Enfield is because he had been an obstacle not so
easily trampled while on his way to wherever he was going.

77
with one when Jekyll explains that his reliance on the younger looking Hyde-disguise increases
with age: “growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more
unwelcome” (62). Here, “incoherency” does not refer to Jekyll’s dual consciousness but instead
to something that is rendered incompatible with his elderliness. While these two examples alone
are insufficient, I will provide further textual evidence that Stevenson allows for the possibility
that, like the many respectable and wealthy gentlemen who were accused in W.T. Stead’s
controversial “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885), Jekyll-as-Hyde’s East End exploits
involve young maidens procured in London’s sex trade.
22

Within the pages of Stead’s racy exposé, there is a description of an anonymous Dr. D—
that could easily be reprinted on the back cover of Jekyll and Hyde’s dust jacket: “Here in
London, moving about clad as respectably in broad cloth and fine linen as any bishop, with no
foul shape or semblance of brute beast to mark him off from the rest of his fellows, is Dr,—, now
retired from his profession and free to devote his fortune and his leisure to the ruin of maids”
(82). And there is proof that Stevenson not only read the “Maiden Tribute” in July of 1885, but
also that he had Dr. D— on his mind when he began writing his novella just two months later, in

22
I am certainly not the first person to suggest this; immediately after the book was published, in February of
1886, the anonymous reviewer of The Court and Society Review proclaims, “Hyde, it is probable, was a kind of
‘Minotaur’” (qtd. in Dury, Intro 18). In fact, it was in the midst of reading Judith Walkowitz’s analysis of the
“Maiden Tribute” and its reciprocal relationship with Victorian fictional forms in City of Dreadful Delight, when I
first discovered that in the summer of 1885, W.E. Henley sent Stevenson the three installments of “Maiden Tribute”
which were printed in Pall Mall Gazette (131). But Walkowitz only mentions this in passing, and I have not come
across any scholarship that explores the textual connections between Jekyll and Hyde and the “Maiden Tribute.”
In “Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr. Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr. Hyde’s Embodiment” (2002),
Robert Mighall refers to Richard Von Kraft-Ebing’s pioneering treatise on sexology, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886),
to tentatively suggest that Jekyll’s account of his “disgraceful pleasures,” which are further alluded to in the
Notebook Draft as “the iron hand of indurated habit,” reveal that as a youth Jekyll was addicted to masturbation or
what is defined as “self-abuse” in Psychopathia Sexualis (155). As the more monstrous Hyde, his behavior borders
on the “sadistic” and when “strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain,” he matches the textbook
description of what Kraft-Ebing identifies as “lust-murder” (157). But assuming that Carew was his first and only
murder victim, the adult Jekyll uses his Hyde-disguise hundreds of times and over the course of a decade before he
commits “lust murder.” While Mighall correctly declines to connect these disparate diagnoses because he is only
interested in offering an historical context for Jekyll-as-Hyde’s behavior, the implicit connection between them
nonetheless supports a common interpretation of Jekyll and Hyde as a critique of sexual repression and that the
young Jekyll’s partaking in shame-inducing “self-abuse” produces the sadistic homicidal adult.

78
September. In a letter from W.E. Henley dated July 9, 1885, Henley writes to ask Stevenson if he
had received the three copies of the Pall Mall Gazette and elaborates: “What we all want to
know is who’s Dr. D—the hero of three maids per fortnight. and who, o who! is the Minotaur,
the devourer of the 2000 virginities at five pounds a piece. . . . Somehow I don’t think the
government can or rather will interfere. If Stead has really been exploring, he has probably got
hold of facts which would upset a good many applecarts” (qtd. in Walkowitz 283n.39).
With its polite, euphemistic language, Dr. Jekyll’s confession could easily serve as Dr.
D—’s self-defense. In fact, it is as if Jekyll relies on the existence of Dr. D— and the popularity
of Stead’s very recent investigation to retrospectively render his transgressions ordinary. Or, if
one supposes that his transgressions are ordinary—whatever they are—some portion of him must
recognize that the majority of ordinary people would find them abhorrent, given that Jekyll
makes “preparations with the most studious care” and literally situates his Hyde-disguise in a
separate single-family abode (62). When Utterson brings Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard
to Hyde’s Soho address, Utterson notes that in spite of her “evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy,”
the housekeeper has excellent manners. Utterson then discerns “A flash of odious joy appeared
upon the woman’s face” when she learns that Hyde is under investigation and responds: “he is in
trouble! What has he done?” (27).
Interestingly, Jekyll’s decision to take a house in Soho and to hire a “silent and
unscrupulous” housekeeper resonates with “Maiden Tribute.” At the risk of overdetermining my
reading of Jekyll-as-Hyde as a sexual criminal interested in the procurement of young children,
allow me to compare Utterson’s impression of the housekeeper and his detailed description of
Hyde’s evacuated quarters with an interview that Stead conducts with a respectable housekeeper
of a West End villa. I will begin with Utterson’s observations of Hyde’s house:

79
In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman remained otherwise
empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms; but these were furnished with luxury
and good taste. A closet was filled with wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant;
a good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who
was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many plies and agreeable in colour.
At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and
hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out; lockfast
drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many
papers had been burned. (27)

If one compares this to Stead’s “Maiden Tribute,” one may notice both the similarity between the
two housekeepers and between the layout and décor—especially the carpets—of the two houses:
“Here,” said the keeper of a fashionable villa, where in days bygone a prince of blood is
said to have kept for some months one of his innumerable sultanas, as she showed her
visitor over the well-appointed rooms, “Here is a room where you can be perfectly
secure. The house stands on its own grounds, the walls are thick, there is a double carpet
on the floor. . . . The girl may scream blue murder, but not a sound will be heard. . . . I
only will be about seeing that all is snug.” “But,” remarked her visitor, “if you hear the
cries of the child, you may yourself interfere, especially if, as may easily happen, I badly
hurt and in fact all but kill the girl.” “ You will not kill her, she answered, “you have too
much sense to kill the girl. Anything short of that, you can do as you please. As for me
interfering, do you think I do not know my business?” Flogging, both of men and women,
goes on regularly in ordinary rooms, but the cry of the bleeding subject never attracts
attention from the outside world. (23–24)
23

Whatever Jekyll’s preferred form of torture, it would take more than a Soho house and an
unscrupulous housekeeper to be able to satisfy his appetites for so long. It would require the
assistance of a community of gentlemen who may not share or even condone Jekyll’s nocturnal
pleasures, but nonetheless share an interest in protecting their privileged social position.
24
Of
course, this is not to say that Jekyll is the only character who secretly indulges in London’s
underworld; Enfield does not hesitate to admit to Utterson that the reason he witnessed Hyde
trample over the young girl is because he was on his way home “from some place at the end of

23
Stead explains that London’s sex trade is not limited to the procurement of young girls but also includes
young boys, although far less frequently. Thus, my reading of Jekyll-as-maiden-snatcher does not preclude the
possibility that Jekyll is a homosexual, as several interpretations of the novella have suggested.
24
One could perhaps argue that Stevenson would even include Stead in this community of gentlemen, and
perhaps his depiction of Utterson was loosely based on him. As Walkowitz writes: “Disequilibrium and excess
shaped Stead’s account of the double life and took its toll on the investigator. For he seems to have gone over the
edge in his attempt to authenticate and document criminal vice. Two eerie features of his narrative soon become
apparent: the readers were shown London’s inferno through Stead’s elite gaze, and exploration led Stead into actual
impersonation of a Minotaur” (101).

80
the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning” (9). But despite Enfield’s own
unnamed predilection for vice, he seems genuinely appalled by the hellish scene and recalls that
his outrage was shared with an apothecary from Edinburgh who also happened to observe
Hyde’s cruel act. What is interesting about Enfield’s reaction is that he makes no pretension of
moral righteousness; he remembers that he and the Scottish “Sawbones”—a slang term for
surgeon—shared an unspoken desire to kill Hyde and “killing being out of the question, we did
next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this” (9–10).
And yet, although Enfield appears a responsible neighbor, his motivation is ambivalent,
and not because he rules out murder simply for realizing its impracticality. Rather, it is
ambivalent because it is unclear to what extent Enfield’s murderous feeling is an instinctive
response to cruelty directed at a child or to Hyde himself, to whom Enfield feels an immediate
loathing (9). Moreover, Stephen Arata highlights a major discrepancy in Enfield’s story when he
points out that though it begins with Hyde trampling a little girl, it “concludes with Enfield, the
doctor, and the girl’s father breakfasting with Hyde in his chambers. Recognizing him as one of
their own, the men literally encircle Hyde to protect him from harm” (239). Ultimately, Arata
argues, Enfield “seems to be describing not a violent criminal but a man who cannot be trusted to
respect club rules. Enfield underscores this point when he says that, in contrast to Hyde, Jekyll
‘is the very pink of the properties’” (241).
25

Mr. Utterson respects club rules and he understands from Enfield’s story that Jekyll’s
reputation might need protection, which is why he omits to tell his cousin that the door in
question leads to Jekyll’s laboratory. The lawyer also decides it is time to play “Mr. Seek” to Mr.

25
Dury makes a similar argument: “A hundred pounds is therefore a huge sum for knocking over a child who is
basically unhurt. Combined with the murderous reaction of the bystanders it leaves the reader with the strong
suspicion that the actual offense was more serious and is being hidden either by Enfield (perhaps to protect Hyde, a
fellow gentleman ‘about town’) or by the elusive narrator of this first part of the text” (86).

81
Hyde (16), but he is so focused on solving the mystery of Hyde and releasing Jekyll from his
incomprehensible bondage that Mr. Utterson ultimately does more harm than good to his social
circle, not to mention the people outside it. He begins his search by visiting Dr. Lanyon, who
tells Utterson that it had been over a decade since he and Jekyll had a falling out over Jekyll’s
unscientific balderdash. Utterson feels relief at seeing Lanyon’s “little spirit of temper,” and he
thinks to himself, “They have only differed on some point of science . . . It is no worse than
that!” (15). Utterson “gave his friend a few seconds to recover his composure” before he
broaches the topic of Jekyll’s protégé, Mr. Hyde, but Lanyon responds, “Never heard of him.
Since my time,” Utterson believes he leaves his old friend empty handed (15).
Utterson is surprisingly incurious when he learns about the rift between his two oldest
friends, the memory of which has a visible effect on Dr. Lanyon, but at this point, there is no
reason that Utterson would suspect that their rift has anything to do with Jekyll’s mysterious
relationship with Hyde, and perhaps it doesn’t. However, in “Dr. Jekyll was Quite at East,” when
Utterson speaks to his client about his preposterous will and Jekyll attempts to change topics by
comparing Utterson’s distress over his will to Lanyon’s distress over his scientific heresies,
Utterson does not appear to make a connection between the two conversations:
“I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,” began the latter. “You know that will of
yours?”
A close observer might have gathered that the topic was distasteful; but the doctor
carried it off gaily. “My poor Utterson,” said he, “you are unfortunate in such a client. I
never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound
pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. Oh, I know he’s a good
fellow—you needn’t frown—an excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him;
but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more
disappointed in any man than Lanyon.”
“You know I never approved of it,” pursued Utterson, ruthlessly disregarding the
fresh topic.” (20–21)

As the narrator indicates above, Utterson is not a close observer; if he frowns at Jekyll’s talk, he
is frowning because Jekyll once again evades his questions, not because of what he says about

82
Lanyon. Utterson is so focused on the will and the mysterious character of Hyde that he does not
consider how Jekyll’s answer might nonetheless be revealing, and he again declines to inquire
after the fight between the two doctors and perhaps uncover why, exactly, Jekyll reserves so
much animosity for Lanyon.
26

But Jekyll’s complaint against the “hide-bound pedant” is also ironic. While Jekyll’s
comment suggests that he sees Lanyon “as foolishly bound to the Hyde part of his personality, or
to his body (his ‘hide’ or ‘skin’), when he might free himself from it like Jekyll” (Dury, Jekyll
and Hyde 92), it also can be applied to Utterson, who is so Hyde-bound that he has become hide-
bound, albeit in his own way. After all, it was only recently when Utterson had set out in search
for Hyde with the belief that “if he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would
lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well
examined” (16). When Mr. Utterson finally has his long-awaited run-in with Hyde, and thus
Jekyll, he puts his theory to the test and asks to see Hyde’s face: “Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate,
and then, as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair
stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. ‘Now I shall know you again,’ said Mr.
Utterson. ‘It may be useful’” (17). Unfortunately for Utterson, his face-to-face encounter leaves
him “the picture of disquietude”; still, the perplexed lawyer declares “There must be something
else . . . . There is something more, if I could find a name for it” (18).
Utterson has another disquieting experience in the company of Inspector Newcomen;
during their cab ride to Soho, he looks at his companion and “was conscious of some touch of
that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest” (26).

26
One possibility that Carew provokes such murderous rage in Jekyll-as-Hyde is that the “aged and beautiful
gentleman with white hair” and “an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as
of a well-founded self-content” bears a resemblance to Dr. Lanyon (24), a “hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced
gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner” (14).

83
While Utterson, who is also an officer of the law, might be correct to suspect Newcomen’s
investigative practices—the Inspector believes that Hyde’s guilt is certain when he retrieves the
checkbook from the fire because “money’s life to the man” (27–28)—Utterson’s own practices
are dubious, to say the least. Utterson recognizes the murder weapon that killed Carew is the
walking stick that he gave to Jekyll many years earlier, but at both the crime scene and Jekyll’s
house, where each half of the stick was found, he remains silent (26, 27). Utterson’s decision to
suppress information that might implicate Jekyll’s involvement is no longer in the interest of
club rules—like Jekyll, Carew was his client and in a very respectable circle. Therefore, as
Utterson continues to rationalize and/or dismiss important clues, his negligence borders on
complicity.
The day after the Carew murder, Jekyll gives Utterson a letter he received from Hyde so
that his lawyer might decide if it should be turned into the police as evidence. When Utterson
turns to his trusted clerk for counsel and presents Mr. Guest with the letter from a supposed mad-
man, the clerk immediately recognizes the similarity between Jekyll and Hyde’s handwriting and
tells Utterson that the hand is not mad but rather odd. Mr. Guest even compares the letter with a
sample of Jekyll’s writing and concludes: “there’s a rather singular resemblance; the two hands
are in many points identical; only differently sloped” (33). Utterson inadequately responds to Mr.
Guest’s important discovery when he calls it “rather quaint” and then requests that his clerk not
speak of Hyde’s note because, as we soon realize, Utterson interprets these clues as evidence that
Jekyll forged for a murderer. Admittedly, forgery is a more feasible conclusion than supposing
that Jekyll can somatically disguise himself; however, all of these scenes are only precursors to
the “Incident at the Window” and yet, they do not prevent Utterson from willfully denying what
he witnesses with his very own eyes.

84
Several months after Carew’s murder in October and Dr. Lanyon’s “remarkable” demise
in late January or early February, Utterson and Enfield are on their weekly walk that once again
brings them in the vicinity of Jekyll’s residence. Utterson spots Jekyll sitting by his laboratory
window “like some disconsolate prisoner” and calls to Jekyll from the courtyard: “You stay too
much indoors. . .You should be out, whipping up the circulation like Enfield and me” (38). Jekyll
says he dare not leave the premises and also apologizes for his inhospitality because he declines
to invite the men inside when suddenly, in the midst of their brief conversation, the cousins
witness Jekyll involuntary transform into Hyde:
the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his [Jekyll’s] face and
succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of
the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse, for the window was instantly
thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court
without a word. . . . They were both pale; and there was an unanswering horror in their
eyes. “God forgive us, God forgive us,” said Mr. Utterson. (39)

His overwhelming desire not to recognize the respectable Jekyll in the despicable Hyde leads
Utterson to further refute an explanation of an inexplicable relationship that he has been
investigating for over one year. By the time Utterson succumbs to Poole’s insistence and agrees
to intervene by knocking down Jekyll’s cabinet door, it is already too late.
Ultimately, Utterson’s refusal to implicate Jekyll, and thus his professional circle more
generally, verifies his early proclamation that he inclines to Cain’s heresy and lets his brother go
to the devil in his own way (7)—a proclamation that associates Utterson’s decision to standby
and not intervene with the bible’s first murderer. And for this, he is rewarded; in the chapter
“The Last Night,” Utterson finds Jekyll’s will in his laboratory and “in the place of Edward
Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable amazement, read the name of Gabriel John Utterson” (49).
But before Utterson exits the scene of “The Last Night” in order to read through the sealed
documents that Jekyll left for him on his laboratory desk, he explains to Poole: “If your master

85
has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these
documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police” (50).
Along with Jekyll’s estate, Utterson has inherited the task of preserving Jekyll’s good name.
However, after Utterson “trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this
mystery was now to be explained” (50), we do not hear from him again—he evacuates his
interlocutory position within the novella.
While Utterson’s collocation in Jekyll’s will seems to put him, and thus the reader, in the
place of Hyde, it puts us all in the shoes of Jekyll—the man who has no regard for others. It
implies that Utterson’s failure to protect the community in his desire to protect Jekyll’s
reputation may only differ in degree from Jekyll’s use of his Hyde-disguise; both involve a
refusal to recognize their neighbors and the cruelty and suffering that they may cause, even
inadvertently. In turn, we are prompted to reflect on the way we interact in our worlds—are we
attentive to those around us or are we incurious? Are we present in our face-to-face encounters or
do we view our neighbors as though in a dream, or through someone else’s eyes—as if we were
a disembodied traveling companion? In Jekyll and Hyde, I believe that Stevenson suggests that
the only thing that can illuminate that elusive veiled prophet, that neighbor within, is if we give
our full and embodied attention to the face of the neighbor without.

86
Chapter Three: The Myth of Community in Shirley Jackson’s Gothic

“The reasons for writing a book can be brought back to the desire to modify the existing
relations between a man and his fellow beings. These relations are judged unacceptable and are
perceived as an atrocious mystery.”
—George Bataille

“All the time you’re digging in remote corners for info on the emergence of myth, there’s little
Shirley showing you how myths arise.”

—Kenneth Burke to Stanley Edgar Hyman, 1953
1

On April 28, 2014, nearly fifty years after Shirley Jackson’s death in 1965, The New
Yorker printed the previously unpublished short story “The Man in the Woods,” which tells of a
solitary wanderer named Christopher who unwittingly ensnares himself in the violent traditions
of an age-old community. “The Man in the Woods” reveals a unifying thread from The Road
Through the Wall (1948) to We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—the two works that
roughly bookend Jackson’s career. With its tightly compounded allusions to folklore, classical
mythology, and Christian theology and its engagement with late nineteenth-century
anthropology, the narrative lays bare what I believe is the underlying concern in all of Jackson’s
work: the enduring myth of an absolute community in which the imperative to commune, or to
sacrifice alterity in the name of conformity, continues to occlude alternative ways of being. It
seems appropriately uncanny that through “The Man in the Woods,” a story that has been buried
within Jackson’s archive at the Library of Congress, the author speaks to us from beyond the
grave and suggests a new way to approach her Gothic project—namely, to present her readers
with countless tales that demonstrate “the possibility of evil” in order to reveal the impossibility

1
This is quoted in Darryl Hattenhauer’s Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic (2003) on p. 137 without any
reference to the original text. Hattenhauer most likely retrieved it from the Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers at the
Library of Congress, which contains letters between Burke and Hyman that span thirty years (1940–1970).
87
of an ethical community whose members refuse to question the distinction between communing
and neighboring.
2

“The Man in the Woods” is a curious tale, perhaps best described as a postmodern folk
narrative.
3
It begins in the world of the fairy tale and opens with a panoramic view of
Christopher as he wearily moves his feet forward on a journey that stretches behind him, “into
the numberless line of walking days that dissolved, seemingly years ago, into the place he had
left” (65). On the morning that the story begins, Christopher has turned, “as though he had a
choice,” onto a forest road by way of a crossroads, and he is grateful for the company of a black
cat who suddenly appears at his side when he feels the frightening trees pressing in closer as he
travels deeper into the forest. Just before nightfall, the road comes to an unexpected stop in front
of an old stone house—or, to be more precise, Christopher and the cat come to an unexpected
stop; for, as the narrator explains, the house is easily found at the end of the forest road because
the road is not, in fact, a road, “but merely a way to the house” (65). Christopher hears the sound
of the river, which “knew a way out of the forest, because it moved . . . unafraid, among the
trees,” and perhaps this provides the necessary reassurance Christopher needs to approach the
stone house “as he would any house, farmhouse, suburban home, or city apartment” and knock
politely and with pleasure (65). But although Christopher’s courteousness is rewarded and he and
the cat are invited in, it is clear—to the reader, anyway—that the road has led him to an
indeterminately distant past. Furthermore, Christopher has traversed the world of fairy tale and
arrived in the world of myth.

2
“The Possibility of Evil” is the title of Jackson’s last short story, which was published posthumously in The
Saturday Evening Post on December 18, 1965, four months after Jackson’s death (Friedman 57). The story also
appears in the Just an Ordinary Day (1996), a two-part collection comprised of thirty-one stories that were
previously unpublished and twenty-three stories that were previously uncollected.
3
I have chosen to use the broader category of folk narrative, which comprises the myth, the legend, and the folk
tale (Teverson 15), because Jackson incorporates aspects of each in “The Man in the Woods,” although ultimately it
seems to function as a myth.
88
The woman who answers the door is wearing a long green robe, gathered at her waist
with a belt of woven grass, and she leads them into the kitchen, aglow with an open-hearth fire.
A second woman, in the same primitive-style dress, stands at the stove, and upon seeing
Christopher, she turns her eyes to a rough measuring system composed of lines and crosses high
on the kitchen wall and says, “Another day” (65). The first woman asks for Christopher’s name
and then introduces herself as Phyllis. When she inquires after the cat’s name and discovers it
does not have one, she responds: “We’ll have to name him something” and announces that their
cat’s name is Grimalkin.
4
Then Phyllis gestures to the cook and says, “Her name’s Aunt Cissy,”
to which the cook replies enigmatically, “Circe I was born and Circe I will have for my name till
I die,” and then lifts a great iron pot and moves it to the stone table with a strength that surprises
Christopher (65–66). Here, Aunt Cissy not only contradicts the connotation of a “sissy” by
identifying herself with the powerful mythological goddess of magic, but she also compares
herself to the biblical character of Job by echoing his pronouncement—“Naked I came from my
mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there” (Job 1:21)—and thus seems to imply that her
current situation may be a divine test of her faith.
5

4
“Grimalkin: [probably Grey a. + Malkin n.,] A name given to a cat; hence, a cat, esp. an old she cat;
contemptuously applied to a jealous or imperious old woman” (“grimalkin, n.”). Considering the parallels between
this scene and the conclusion of the story, Grimalkin undoubtedly refers to William Baldwin’s version of the folk
tale (or migratory legend) the “King of the Cats,” found in his proto-novel Beware the Cat (1553), which tells the
story of a man who has a surreal run-in with a cat while riding through the country on business: “a cat, as he
thought, leaped out of a bush before him and called him twice or thrice by his name. But because he made none
answer nor spake (for he was so afraid that he could not), she spake to him plainly twice or thrice these words
following: ‘Commend me unto Titton Tatton and to Puss thy Catton, and tell her that Grimalkin is dead.’ This done
she went her way, and the man went forward about his business. And after that he was returned home, in an evening
sitting by the fire with his wife and his household, he told of his adventure in the wood. And when he had told them
all the cat’s message, his cat, which had hearkened unto the tale, looked upon him sadly, and at last said, ‘And is
Grimalkin dead? Then farewell dame,’ and therewith went her way and was never seen after” (Baldwin qtd. in
Batcher 428–29). In another version of the folk tale, the man witnesses a funeral for the King of the Cats—here
named Peter—which takes place inside the hollow trunk of and old oak tree, and in the end, his own cat proclaims:
“By Jove! old Peter’s dead! And I’m the King o’ the Cats!” (Hartland 126–27). For more on “The King of the Cats,”
see Teverson’s Fairy Tale (2013); and on the origin of the name, see Spitzer’s “(Gri)malkin,” in The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology (1944).
5
In addition to being the shortened form of the name Cecilia, cissy is a variant spelling of sissy, which means
“effeminate; cowardly” (“cissy”; “sissy,” def. 2).
89
When the dinner table is set with heavy stone plates and mugs (66), the two women
congregate at the far wall and stand respectfully to await the arrival of Mr. Oakes, who, upon
entering the kitchen and seeing Christopher, also consults the rough measuring system on the
wall. He too wears a belted green robe, but whereas the women have a vigorous, almost ageless
quality (65), Mr. Oakes seems old and tired, and falling into resignation (66). Once they are all
seated, Mr. Oakes inquires after Christopher’s journey and what takes place in the world he has
left (66), but he receives vague replies, even when Christopher tries to speak frankly:
“I don’t really know quite how I got here,” he said. “I just took the road into the
woods.”
“You would have to go through the woods to get here,” his host agreed soberly.
“Before that,” Christopher went on, I passed a lot of farmhouses and a little town—
do you know the name of it? I asked a woman there for a meal and she turned me away.”
He laughed now, at the memory, with Aunt Cissy’s good dinner finished.
“And before that,” he said, “I was studying.”
“You are a scholar,” the old man said. “Naturally.”
“I don’t know why.” Christopher turned at last to Mr. Oakes and spoke frankly. “I
don’t know why,” he repeated. “One day I was there, in college, like everyone else, and
then the next day I just left, without any reason except that I did.” He glanced from Mr.
Oakes to Phyllis to Aunt Cissy; they were all looking at him with blank expectation. He
stopped, and said lamely, “And I guess that’s all that happened before I came here.” (67,
emphasis added)

Phyllis charitably shifts the focus away from Christopher by telling Mr. Oakes that Christopher
brought a cat. Mr. Oakes replies disjunctively that “One brought a dog,” and turns to Aunt Cissy
and asks if she remembers the dog, to which she only nods, “her face unchanging” (67). In this
brief exchange, Mr. Oakes insinuates that they receive many passersby at this remote forest
dwelling, or at least enough passersby that Mr. Oakes does not refer to this specific one by
90
name.
6
He also exhibits his tendency to defer to Aunt Cissy, and the fact that he alone calls her
Circe (66)—and thus appears to acknowledge her power—underlines the discrepancy between
the patriarchal unit the threesome appears to represent and the reality of Mr. Oakes’s authority.
7

But Mr. Oakes hardly occupies an enviable position if he submits to the same hierarchical
laws that he extends to Grimalkin when the cat comes inside for his supper, and, after a brief
confrontation with Christopher’s cat, runs back outside in a fright (67). When Christopher
apologizes and offers to go find Grimalkin, he receives an eerie response from his hosts, as Mr.
Oakes laughs, “He was fairly beaten and he has no right to come back.” “Now,” Phyllis said
softly, “we can call your cat Grimalkin. Now we have a name, Grimalkin, and no cat, so we can
give the name to your cat’” (67). Later, as Christopher prepares to sleep in his small stone room
at the top of the small stone house, he seems not to have recognized the foreboding scene at
dinner when he contentedly says to the cat: “This is quite a forest. . . . And quite a family” (67).
The following day, the mystery surrounding the “family” only intensifies. At breakfast,
Mr. Oakes is silent, but afterward, he gestures to Christopher to follow him to the hall, where Mr.
Oakes explains: “You have only seen part of the house, of course. . . . Our handmaidens keep to
the kitchen unless called to this hall,” which is true even at night, when they are sleeping (68).
Mr. Oakes begins his tour by bringing Christopher to a room filled with leather-bound books,
stone tablets, and rolls of parchment:

6
Although admittedly, any name other than the Fool might have obfuscated Jackson’s already obscure allusion
to the Tarot. In an interview about The New Yorker’s publication of “The Man in the Woods,” Laurence Jackson
Hyman proves himself a worthy spokesperson for his mother by reminding the reader of Jackson’s expansive
knowledge of both the traditional scholarly subjects and the occult. When asked about the significance of Circe’s
name, Hyman begins his response by stating the obvious—“I think Shirley’s use of the name Circe was to make sure
that the reader understands the mythological components, just in case he hadn’t noticed”—only to casually illustrate
his point by revealing an intertextual reference that I imagine many people, myself included, would not have
recognized without his help: “The symbols are abundant and almost playful, such as suggesting the Fool and his dog
from the tarot as a previous, unsuccessful visitor” (“This Week in Fiction: Shirley Jackson,” par. 4).
7
Mr. Oakes first uses the name when he explains “Circe gathers her onions by the river” (66). Phyllis,
Christopher, and the narrator refer to her as Aunt Cissy.
91
“They are of great value,” Mr. Oakes said sadly. “I have never known how to use them,
of course.” He walked slowly over and touched one huge volume, and then turned to
show Christopher his fingers covered with dust. “It is my sorrow,” he said, “that I cannot
use these things of great value.”
Christopher, frightened by the books, drew back into the doorway. “At one time, Mr.
Oakes said, shaking his head, “there were many more. Many, many more. I have heard
that at one time this room was made large enough to hold the records. I have never
known how they came to be destroyed.” (68)

Next, Mr. Oakes leads Christopher across the hall to his bedroom to show him where “The
keeper of the records” sleeps. Christopher sees a long glittering knife displayed on the wall
above the bed, and although Mr. Oakes does not explain why it is there, he implies that he uses it
to protect the records. Before taking their leave, Mr. Oakes looks at Christopher in the
candlelight and makes a curious pronouncement: “We are like two friends. . . . One showing the
other his house” (68).
The last stop on the tour is outside, to see Mr. Oakes’s roses, and Christopher follows
helplessly as his host brings him nearer to the possessive forest. Mr. Oakes tells Christopher: “I
was the first one to clear away even this much of the forest. Because I wished to plant roses in
the midst of this wilderness.” But as Mr. Oakes continues, he reveals that Aunt Cissy is really the
one who is responsible for cultivating the land: “I had to send Circe from the midst of this beast
around us, to set them here in my little clear spot.” After Mr. Oakes gives Christopher
instructions for tying up the roses every spring—instructions that involve little effort, thanks to
Aunt Cissy—he says “Remember who planted them,” and now, there is no longer any question
that Christopher is expected to be Mr. Oakes’s successor. But to what? And why?
A little while later, Aunt Cissy and Phyllis prepare for a large feast and Christopher’s
question about who will be attending is met with silence. But when Mr. Oakes reenters the
kitchen with the large knife and Aunt Cissy brings him a grindstone, the reader understands that
the answer somehow depends on Christopher’s ability to defeat Mr. Oakes and assume his
92
position as the host. As he sharpens the knife with “infinite delicacy,” Mr. Oakes turns his
attention to Christopher:
“You say you’ve come from far?” he said. . . .
“Quite a ways,” Christopher said, watching the grindstone. “I don’t know how far,
exactly.”
“And you were a scholar?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “A student.”
Mr. Oakes looked up from the knife again, to the estimate marked on the wall.
“Christopher,” he said softly, as though estimating the name. (69)

Aunt Cissy speaks, unsolicited, for the first time: “Sun’s down” (69), and with the knife in one
hand, Mr. Oakes puts his arm briefly around Christopher’s shoulder and reminds him about the
roses, then moves to the back door and waits for Aunt Cissy to open it for him, and exits. A
minute later, Aunt Cissy opens the door for Christopher, and as he takes his leave, he hears
Phyllis’s soft voice behind him: “He’ll be down by the river …. Go far around and come up
behind him.” Outside, Christopher stands in terror with his back pressed against the door behind
him and from the darkness ahead, he hears a “voice so clear and ringing through the trees that he
hardly knew it as Mr. Oakes’s: ‘Who is he dares enter these my woods?’” (69).
The narrative ends here, and although there are several clues that point to the possibility
that Christopher will survive the duel, this by no means implies a happy ending. Even if
Christopher inherits Oakes’s position as his cat inherited Grimalkin’s, he has been forced to
sacrifice his autonomy to an outmoded phallocratic tradition that relegates women to the kitchen
and involves a violent ritual he does not comprehend—a ritual that would require him to offer
hospitality to passersby who would, presumably, fall victim to Christopher’s knife until one of
them proves to be Christopher’s murderer. In “The Lottery” (1948), Tessie Hutchinson may not
fully understand the reason for the ritual sacrifice, but she knows as well as anyone else in the
village that there has always been a lottery (297). The story inspires terror because Tessie
Hutchinson becomes the victim of a fatal stoning that, until her lot is drawn, she upholds just like
93
everyone else—to repeat Christopher’s comment about the college he left—hence the irony of
her famous protest, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right” (302). In “The Man in the Woods,” however,
Christopher has no prior knowledge of the violent ritual in which he is expected to take part.
Readers who are well-versed in Roman mythology or late nineteenth-century
anthropology might recognize that “The Man in the Woods” is influenced by the ancient legend
of Rex Nemorensis, the murderous priest at Diana of Nemi’s woodland sanctuary in Aricia, Italy.
In The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, Sir James Frazer goes to great lengths—twelve
volumes in fact—to explain the ritual of the King of the Wood who keeps vigil at a sacred tree,
likely an oak, in order to both protect the holy sanctuary and to wait for the arrival of his
murderous successor, who must be a runaway slave and who must first prove his divinity by
plucking a branch (the golden bough) of the sacred tree (Frazer 11–13).
8
To unlock the mystery
of this rude and barbarous custom (12), Frazer takes a universalist approach and compares
countless rituals from around the world—the “comparative method” has little regard for context
(Coupe 19)—and he concludes that the violent succession at Nemi enacts the drama of the dying
and reviving god and thus, the key to the ritual is the fertility myth.
9
Laurence Coupe briefly
explains how this works:
The god, or his impersonator, has to die precisely because his business is fertility. The
community depends on him, or so it believes, for its own survival. If the god does not die
he cannot be reborn to fertilize the goddess, and so there will be no new crops. The
underlying principle is that of magic, which for Frazer is the origin of all myth-making
and all religion. Indeed, he goes further, and credits magic with the beginning of secular
authority, and so of civilization itself; not only the first priests, but the first kings were
evidently magicians. (20)

8
Not only did Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, write about Frazer in The Tangled
Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and Freud as Imaginative Writers (1962), but a library check-out card among her
papers at the Library of Congress shows that Jackson borrowed Frazer’s Golden Bough while in college (Hall, A
Study 48, 94n.40).
9
In “The Lottery,” Jackson more explicitly invokes the fertility myth when Old Man Warner recalls the saying,
“Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (297).
94
If we read “The Man in the Woods” through the lens of the King of the Wood, which
perhaps would have been a more suitable name for Jackson’s posthumously-titled story, then
things begin to make more sense. Each of Jackson’s fictional characters correspond with one
from Frazer’s account: Aunt Cissy is Diana of Nemi, Mr. Oakes is the King of the Wood,
Christopher is the potential successor, and Pyllis is Egeria, the water nymph associated with
Diana and the sacred grove, the same Egeria who is also believed to have been the divine
inspiration for the laws that King Numa gave to the Romans (Frazer 14)—laws that are arguably
represented by the “valuable records” that Mr. Oakes guards.
But Jackson does not simply reiterate the legend of the King of the Wood. As their names
suggest, Phyllis and Circe also allude to Greek mythological characters, which in turn draws a
parallel between Christopher and Odysseus, who spends a memorable year with Circe in Aeaea
after she reverses her magical spell that had transformed his men into swine.
10
That Odysseus
resumes his epic journey after his stay with Circe suggests that perhaps “The Man in the Woods”
is instead concerned with the hero myth and Christopher will find his way out of the forest by
way of the river. Of course, Jackson’s radical typology of myth (Coupe 100) becomes all the
more disorienting when we consider how Christopher’s name and his journey through the
wilderness liken him to Jesus Christ. Whereas Renaissance scholars put the hero myth into the
service of Christianity and viewed Odysseus’s return to Ithaca as demonstrating the path of a
wise Christian who does not succumb to temptation (98), Frazer implies that Christ is yet another
variant of the dying and reviving god of the fertility myth (21). Finally, Jackson’s intertextual

10
See Book 10 of Homer’s The Odyssey.
95
reference to the “King of the Cats,” a folk tale with contested origins, serves to remind the reader
not to draw hasty conclusions based on surface similarities.
11

Therefore, “The Man in the Woods” is both a composite tale—with its intricate overlay
of folk narratives, many of which bear a family resemblance—and an original text because
Jackson uses these narratives in a way that complicates any easy analysis of her short story.
12

Although Frazer makes connections between mythology and religion (and science), and
underscores the pagan origins of Christianity, “The Man in the Woods” does not comply with
Frazer’s theory because it gestures toward alternative possibilities that Frazer excises from his
proto-structuralist mythography. Rather than develop a theoretical system from what is at best an
“association of practices,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein says of Frazer in Remarks on the Golden
Bough (143), Jackson invents a ceremony, not a system (151), and she describes it from a wholly
different perspective than the retrospective gaze of reductive anthropology. For all of these
reasons, I argue that “The Man in the Woods” improvises myth (mythopoeia) to expose the

11
Some scholars view the folk tale as a variant of the dying god, à la the legend of the Death of Pan as told by
Plutarch, while others believe that it developed independently and classify it as a migratory legend in the subtype
called “Fairy sends a message” (Lindlow 163–65). Regardless of whether or not the folk tale and the Pan legend are
actually connected, I have little doubt that Jackson was interested in the thematic overlaps of all these different folk
narratives. For more on the origin and development of the Grimalkin story, see James T. Batcher’s “The Grimalkin
Story in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat” (2006); for an overview of “King of the Cats” in relation to various migratory
legend types, see John Lindlow’s “Cats and Dogs, Trolls and Devils: At Home in Some Migratory Legend Types”
(2007).
12
Coupe attributes the “family-resemblance” approach, or that which “avoids the inevitable dogmatism of any
mythography that insists on bringing to the fore one or other example or kind of myth, and which is determined to
state its necessary features,” to theologian Don Cupitt (5–6). However, this phrase is generally associated with
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and although he does not use the phrase in his critique of The Golden Bough, he nonetheless
takes this approach.
96
shaky foundations of any originary myth, which includes Frazer’s metanarrative and which is a
myth of myth.
13

Jackson uses literature to resist the totalizing capacity of myth; she writes to interrupt
myth, and as Jean-Luc Nancy asserts in The Inoperative Community (1986), the interruption of
myth “represents the interruption of a certain discourse of the communitarian project, history,
and destiny” (68).
14
Through the records that Mr. Oakes guards, “The Man in the Woods” self-
reflexively represents the potential to interrupt such a discourse. Regardless of whether or not
these archival texts contain traces of alternative histories (perhaps some matriarchal) that have
been suppressed, they signify an approach to the past that resists traditional historicism.
Although Mr. Oakes discloses a fatherly-like pride that Christopher was once a scholar and
might be able to use the records he feels certain are of great value (68), Christopher corrects Mr.
Oakes and reminds him that he was only a student (69). If anything, Christopher has the makings
of a dissident scholar; while he has yet to reflect adequately on his decision to leave college, he
implies that it had something to do with institutionalized education, which might explain why he

13
Jackson’s unworking of Frazer’s hypothesis corresponds on many levels with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the
Golden Bough, which was written during Jackson’s lifetime but was not published until 1967 and not translated into
English until 1979. One may wonder if Wittgenstein’s proposition that “one could invent (devise) all these
ceremonies oneself” is a nod to Freud (151), who theorizes about the beginning of social organization, moral
restriction, and religion by offering a fictional account of the end of the primal horde, in which the tyrannical father
is murdered by his sons (141–42) in Totem and Taboo (1913)—a book that was heavily influenced by Frazer and his
contemporaries. But again, while Jackson implies that our history still informs the present, her story provides no
closure and resists positivist interpretation. Moreover, although it is difficult to explain exactly how this would
work, especially in light of Freud’s comments on J. J. Atkinson’s hypothesis (142n. 1), the ceremony in the “The
Man in the Woods” seems more like a “primal” scene of the second degree—one that recurs after the primal father
is murdered.
14
Nancy defines myth as “above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times founding the intimate
being of a community. The Greek muthos . . . becomes ‘myth’ when it takes on a whole series of values that
amplify, fill, and ennoble this speech, giving it the dimensions of a narrative of origins and an explanation of
destinies . . . . This speech is not a discourse that would come in response to the inquisitive mind: it comes in
response to a waiting rather than the question, and to a waiting on the part of the world itself. In myth the world
makes itself known, and it makes itself known through declaration or through a complete and decisive revelation”
(48, emphasis added). Thus, interrupting myth means to interrogate “great speech” (49), or logos; “the interruption
is not a silence” (61). Although Nancy does not offer examples of literary variations on myth that deflate, and
therefore interrupt, the “great speech” of myth, I believe that his theory is compatible with myth and fairy tale
criticism that embraces the radical potential of literary revisions of myth and fairy tales.
97
is frightened at the sight of the massive books. In other words, the story’s hanging ending gives
us the freedom to imagine different possibilities, or sideshadows, to what myth usually presents
as inevitable.
15
If Christopher does defeat Oakes, perhaps he will read the records, challenge an
outmoded ritualism, and find a way out of the proverbial woods. Perhaps Aunt Cissy will
reconsider her Job-like patience and release her inner-Circe; or maybe Phyllis, as a variant of
Egeria, will rebel against patriarchal authority, enabling her writing to see the light of day.
16

In the following chapter, I will show that Jackson is a rigorous (re)reader of traditional
discourse—such as the Bible, Enlightenment philosophy, folk narratives, seventeenth-century
demonology, true crime narratives, and postwar popular magazines—and uses her fiction to
expose the unstable foundations of dominant ideology that, by virtue of its exclusivity, bars the
very possibility of an ethical community. Just as Jackson uses intertextuality to interrupt myth,
she ironically employs Gothic tropes to exhibit that the violence that threatens to emerge from
even the most mundane situations stems from repressive, rationalist discourse rather than the
supernatural. For instance, in “Flower Garden” (1949), the recently widowed Mrs. MacLane
quickly becomes an outcast in her rural Vermont community when she disregards Mrs.
Winning’s advice and hires Mr. Jones to help with her garden work. In her depiction of a single
woman who is targeted for associating with a black man who lives just outside of town (116),
Jackson subtly echoes the countless testimonies found in demonology books in which an accused

15
I use the term “sideshadow” in reference to Gary Saul Morson’s idea of “sideshadowing,” or a narrative
technique in which an author exposes the shadow of an alternative present. In Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows
of Time (1994), Morson explains that in contrast to foreshadowing, “which projects onto the present a shadow from
the future,” sideshadowing projects from the side and “allows us to see what might have been and therefore changes
our view of what is. In this way, sideshadowing restores our sense of the middle realm of possibility for time itself
becomes a succession not just of points of actuality but also of fields of possibility” (11–12). I am much indebted to
John Gerlach’s article “To Close or Not to Close: Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman’” (2007) for
introducing me to this concept.
16
Although Phyllis is described as soft-spoken and seems inexperienced—even innocent—in comparison with
Mr. Oakes or Aunt Cissy, she defies expectation at the end of the story when she tells Christopher that Mr. Oakes
will be down by the river and to come up from behind (69).
98
witch confesses to consorting with the devil, who, as we saw in “Thrawn Janet,” is often
described as a black man.
17
But in her modern rendition of this historical neighbor plot, Jackson
does not simply reverse the terms and reveal that the real source of evil is Mrs. MacLane’s racist
neighbors; rather, by focalizing through Mrs. Winning, whose own position within the
community is threatened by Mrs. Winning’s association with the black man, Jackson
demonstrates how evil is synonymous with the operative in community.
Within her oeuvre, Jackson uses sideshadowing to reveal that alternative possibilities
reside within every narrative trajectory. That said, although I often call attention to recurring
themes, characterization, and plot scenarios, I have chosen the term “neighboring narratives” for
the subtitle of chapter five to emphasize that though there may be family resemblances, each of
these narratives is unique. I also chose this phrase to underline how Jackson’s sideshadowing
goes hand-in-hand with her work of interrupting the myth of community—a work that is really
an unworking, and one that is never over.
18
As We Have Always Lived in the Castle perhaps best
demonstrates, the moment that things get comfortable is often the most dangerous, and such a
reading only becomes fully apparent in light of “The Man in the Woods.” For, in many ways,
Jackson presents a similar scenario in the novel as in “The Man in the Woods” except that at the
start of the novel, Mary Katherine Blackwood (Merricat) and her sister Constance—who
resemble Phyllis and Aunt Cissy—have already disassembled the Blackwood patriarchy and
have been living on their own for six years. However, when their cousin Charles arrives, he
threatens to restore the Blackwood mansion to its original honor by marrying Constance and

17
Such testimonies are featured in Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus; or, Full and Plain Evidence
Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1689), from which Jackson derived the four epigraphs for each section in The
Lottery (1949). The epigraph for Section III (141), excerpted from Relation XXVIII, touching on the bewitching of
the Scottish Sir George Maxwell (Glanvill 466–67), concerns an accused witch named Margaret Johnson who
identifies the Devil as a black Man twice.
18
Nancy states: “Community necessarily takes place in what [Maurice] Blanchot has called ‘unworking,’
referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do
either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension” (31).
99
inheriting her fortune. But in Castle, Jackson introduces a protagonist who quickly adapts her
defensive strategy to challenge this new menace. It should therefore come as no surprise that
Merricat is an avid reader; she prefers fairy tales and history, and as I will illustrate, it is
precisely Merricat’s knowledge of these genres that enables her to circumvent the traditional
narrative closure that Charles’s arrival represents, and instead, sever the narrative on her own
terms, with a deeply ironic “we are so happy” (146).
We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson’s final completed novel, and yet, her
work of interrupting myth continues. In Private Demons (1988), Judy Oppenheimer relays a
lovely dream that Jackson’s son Barry had after his mother’s sudden death in 1965, and it
perfectly captures the essence of Jackson’s ongoing project:
He [Barry] saw Shirley, dressed in a white flowing gown, walking back and forth along
the sands of an endless seashore, obviously intent on some task.
Eagerly he approached her. Where have you been? he said. We thought you were
dead. Why are you out here?
She had a mission to fulfill, she said, simply. She couldn’t stop until she was done.
It seemed a terrible, lonely thing to him, being out there on the sands, but Shirley
made light of it, the way she’d always been able to do. Well, she said, grinning, it was a
long time out there between brandies, she had to admit . . . but this was something she
had to do. It was work that was essential. (279, ellipsis in orig.)

Stanley Edgar Hyman always understood that Jackson’s work was essential, and he believed that
it would only become more relevant with time. In the preface for the first posthumous collection
of Jackson’s writing, The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966), he writes: “I think that the future will
find her powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity increasingly significant and meaningful,
and that Shirley Jackson’s work is among that small body of literature produced in our time that
seems apt to survive” (ix). And indeed, Hyman was correct; while it took longer than Hyman
might have hoped, today it seems certain that Jackson’s work will not only survive, but that it
100
will continue to grow. In August 2015, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Jackson’s death,
Random House will release a new collection of her work, Let Me Tell You.
19

Within academia, interest in Jackson’s literature has been steadily increasing over the
past two decades. Scholars such as Joan Wylie Hall, Bernice M. Murphy, and Darryl
Hattenhauer have offered invaluable, reparative studies that have stressed Jackson’s influence on
American literature in general and on a number of Gothic subgenres in particular, from female,
queer, domestic, suburban, New England, to proto-postmodern Gothic. However, the tendency
for scholars to read Jackson through a regional, psychological, or sexual lens continues to eclipse
how all of these specific lenses are a part of something larger—Jackson’s subtle but tireless
critique of dominant discourses that perpetuate the myth of an operative community. By enlisting
the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Luce Irigaray, I want to demonstrate Jackson’s affinity with
deconstructionist and poststructuralist philosophy while at the same time acknowledging that
Jackson’s philosophy—if one can call it that—is first and foremost literary.
In the pages that follow, I trail Jackson through an alternating American landscape, from
the country, through the suburbs, to the city, and back. I will devote the rest of this chapter to
Jackson’s often-overlooked first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), which is an in-depth
portrait of an exclusive community within an insular neighborhood. In the next chapter, I will
zoom in a little closer and focus on a selection of stories from The Lottery (1949) that concern a
particular character, or a set of characters, struggling to maintain a tentative position within the
community, and in the final chapter of this section, I will introduce one of Jackson’s later short
stories, “The Missing Girl” (1957), as a transition into my reading of We Have Always Lived in

19
Let Me Tell You, which is edited by two of Jackson’s children, will include “Paranoia” and “The Man in the
Woods,” the two previously unpublished stories that were recently printed in The New Yorker, and a foreword by
Ruth Franklin, who is currently working on a new biography of Jackson, which is slated to be published by W.W.
Norton in 2016.
101
the Castle (1962). By concentrating on Jackson’s short fiction and novels that are most
concerned with neighbor relations, or lack thereof, I will show that Jackson’s unceasing
commitment to interrupting myth, to unworking the operative community of common being, is
also a commitment to revising our relationship to others. Regardless if another is also a friend,
lover, friend, family member, or stranger, this other is also a being-in-common, or a fellow being,
a neighbor. And it is through writing that we can begin to understand the difference between
communing (common being) and neighboring (being-in-common):
In a sense, we understand ourselves and the world by sharing this writing, just as the
group understood itself by listening to myth. Nonetheless, we understand only that there
is no common understanding of community, that sharing does not constitute an
understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a
knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-
common. (Nancy 69)

The unworking of community is the unworking of telos, logos, History, and it entails
resisting nostalgia for a lost community that never existed and was never to come (10). As Nancy
states: “Our history begins with the departure of Ulysses and with the onset of rivalry,
dissension, and conspiracy in his palace” (10). And thus, we will leave our Ulysses-like
Christopher to struggle in the woods while we journey across the broken-down palaces of
Jackson’s fictional world.
The Road Through the Wall
“Now, with this madness of destruction—the disregarding abandoned battering tearing-apart of
things permanent because they had been standing so long—what with tearing down walls and
selling land, who could tell what would follow?”

—Mr. Martin

Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), is set in the summer 1936, and
intermittingly weaves the portraits of the eleven neighboring houses on Pepper Street, a
secluded, middle- to upper-middle-class section of Cabrillo, CA, thirty miles outside of San
102
Francisco. The Road is a challenge to reading; there is a large cast of characters with
frustratingly similar names, and it is easy to get lost in the narrative’s multiple focalization that
alternates scene by scene, from one character to the next. But the book also proves challenging
because the episodic plot concerns the discriminatory practices of an operative community, and
the conclusion involves the mysterious death of three-year-old Caroline Desmond, who
disappears from her parents’ sight at the Ransom-Jones’s neighborhood party, and the
subsequent suicide of twelve-year-old Tod Donald. Although there are a few residents on Pepper
Street who have their doubts that Tod could have been capable of a murder-suicide, no one
demands an official investigation, and thus, the novel concludes without providing the reader any
resolution, only the grim realization that Tod is an alibi for an operative community.
When The Road was published in February of 1948, it received mixed reviews. Whereas
Andrew Widem of The Hartford Courant complains that the novel has no dominant mood and
suffers from its lack of consistent theme or plot situation (SM14), Andrea Parke of the New York
Times Book Review offers a generally positive review but declares the tragic climax is “the one
false note in a book that otherwise has been written with an unerring set of values” (26).
The most favorable write-up of The Road appears in The New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” section;
this reviewer praises both the novel’s style and the grisly plot twist but borders on faulting
Jackson’s prosaicism by associating The Road with the already exhausted catalog of fiction
concerned with life in the suburbs (94): “A climax hung on the gruesome death of two children
accounts for some of the story’s effectiveness, but most of its success derives from the author’s
style, a supple and resourceful instrument that makes her shopworn material appear much fresher
than it is” (97).
103
Of all of Jackson’s books, The Road Through the Wall would benefit the most from the
long-anticipated Jackson revival. For, regardless of the initial reviews, Jackson’s debut novel
simply did not have enough time to garner the attention of readers before June 26, 1948, when
The New Yorker printed “The Lottery,” which would catapult Jackson’s career and eclipse The
Road Through the Wall for years to come. But unfortunately, more recent criticism provides little
indication of a forthcoming sea change in The Road’s reception history. To the best of my
knowledge, only two Jackson scholars—Darryl Hattenhauer and Joan Wylie Hall—have devoted
any considerable attention to The Road, and Hattenhauer provides the lengthier of the two
readings.
20
Although he easily recognizes The Road is a hybrid novel with political content
worthy of in-depth analysis, he still approaches the text with hesitation because he seems to have
difficulty aligning The Road with Jackson’s later, more psychologically-oriented narratives that
are the backbone of his central thesis that Jackson’s fiction is proto-postmodernist. Therefore,
Hattenhauer argues that The Road is a modernist text, but as the introductory passage reveals, he
wavers in this assessment—especially near the end—as he stumbles through the tenuous
distinction between modernism and postmodernism:
Of all of her novels, this one comes closest to expressing her political themes about
gender, ethnicity, and class explicitly. And its form owes more to modernist realism than
do her others. Its episodic plot makes it a composite novel—it reads a little like a short
story cycle. This discontinuous quality arises not only from the episodic plot but also
from the dizzying array of characters, none of whom is readily identifiable as the
protagonist. And the matching array of family households creates a setting that frustrates
spatial orientation. As such, this debut volume is solidly modernist and does not give
strong hints of the complex forms to come. Nonetheless, this novel evinces concern with
language in subject formation and interpellation, destabilizes narrative reliability a little,
and lacks clear plot resolution. (83)

Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, The Haunting of Hill House—these novels concern the
disunified characterization and narrative indeterminacy that Hattenhauer uses to define Jackson

20
Outside of Jackson criticism proper, there is an essay on the author in And Then There Were Nine. . . More
Women of Mystery (1985), in which Carol Cleveland focuses on Jackson’s experimental use of classic detective
stories and hard-boiled mysteries, and includes a brief but nonetheless solid analysis of The Road.
104
as a proto-postmodernist. And because The Lottery contains several short stories that anticipate
these books—most of which were written after Jackson completed The Road—Hattenhauer
marginalizes The Road and instead presents The Lottery (1949) as Jackson’s paradigm-shifting
work.
21
On the one hand, Hattenhauer’s division makes sense; while The Road features psycho-
narration and quoted monologue, the third-person narrative does not contain the same
disorienting mix of psycho-narration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue as The
Lottery’s “The Daemon Lover” and “Pillar of Salt.”
22
The Road’s authorial narrator maintains an
ironic distance throughout the novel, which is only intensified by the novel’s variable
focalization. Stylistically, then, The Road seems to conform to modernist novels that reintroduce
an audible narrator who, rather than evade an inside view of its characters—as in Fielding’s Tom
Jones (1749) and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848)—is put in the service of individual psychology
(26).
23
On the other hand, it seems that Hattenhauer privileges one type of narrative
indeterminacy over another in his assessment of The Road as a modernist text, which seems
unnecessary because he actually suggests another explanation for why Jackson’s first novel does
not hint at the “complex forms” (e.g. psychological disunification) to come: The Road concerns
the initial process of psychological unification.

21
In contradistinction to his argument about The Road, Hattenhauer states: “This collection [The Lottery]
features the defamiliarization and estrangement that Jackson will develop throughout her career. Perhaps more than
any other volume, this one uses the double in psychological fables of the disunified subject. Moreover, it establishes
what will become her recurrent use of architecture as a metaphor for the self. It also begins what will become
Jackson’s increasingly complex forms of unreliable narration. And it develops what will become her lifelong theme
of writing about writing, particularly the role of language in subject formation. As proto-postmodernist fiction, it
should be ranked with the most significant proto-postmodernist debut anthologies of the 1940s and 1950s” (29).
22
I am using the terminology Cohn introduces in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes For Presenting
Consciousness in Fiction (1978). Cohn briefly defines the other two presentation of third-person consciousness as
“1. psycho-narration: the narrator’s discourse about a character’s consciousness; 2. quoted monologue: a character’s
mental discourse; 3. narrated monologue: a character’s mental discourse in the guide of the narrator’s discourse”
(14).
23
Of course, The Lottery contains stories with a similarly audible narrator; the narrative voice in “Like Mother
Used to Make” and “Flower Garden” reminds one of the one that Jackson employs in The Road.
105
One aspect of The Road that is unusual—and one that critics do not seem to have
noticed—is that the novel is nearly two hundred pages and the narrator’s focus does not stray
beyond the strictly residential area of Pepper Street between Cortez and Winslow Road.
24

Children and their mothers regularly visit downtown Cabrillo, and several of the fathers travel to
and from San Francisco, but the narrator never actually accompanies anyone outside the one-
block radius of the Pepper Street neighborhood. While some of the short stories in The Lottery
never move beyond the kitchen table, many of the more mature (and psychologically-interested)
narratives—“The Daemon Lover,” “Flower Garden,” and “Pillar of Salt”—follow the
protagonist into ordinary, social spaces such as the grocery store, newsstand, and coffee shop.
The Road’s strictly confined setting combined with the variable focalization of several
characters, many of whom are coming of age and thus in the process of subject formation,
indicates that the distance between The Road and The Lottery is simply a matter of perspectival
distance. The Road does disrupt the notion of the unified subject; however, the unified subject
that it is interested in is that of an absolute community.
If Hattenhauer had been a bit more flexible from the start of his argument and
reconsidered the strict parameters of Jackson’s proto-postmodernism, than he may have
recognized that since her very first novel, Jackson was producing the forward-looking writing
that he wishes to champion (2). But, to be clear, Jackson’s writing is forward-looking from the
standpoint of modernism, not from her position in history, and Jackson’s historical outlook is
precisely why I argue The Road is postmodernist. As Linda Hutcheon explains: “What
postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding

24
This area includes the eleven neighboring houses and the creek running along the south side of Pepper Street.
There is also one scene that takes place in an apartment building situated on the north side of Pepper Street, which
stands out because it is the only scene in the novel that takes place in a home besides one of the eleven houses within
the one-block radius.
106
or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent
timeless meaning, but rather a reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the
present” (19). Jackson’s style includes various modern techniques, from sideshadowing to
narrative indeterminacy and nonclosure, all of which can easily be classified as modernist;
however, it is her approach to history, and the philosophy of history, that separates her from her
modernist precursors.
Although Judy Oppenheimer’s handling of The Road is likely another reason that it has
continued to be underappreciated, Jackson’s biographer does provide us a rare opportunity to
hear the author’s reflections on her first novel by excerpting an unpublished statement of intent
in which Jackson earnestly conveys a forward-looking view of the past (187).
25
This is neither
the eulogistic nor impetuous voice of a modernist; rather, this is the voice of the aftermath:
“I have had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatural,” she
wrote after The Road was published. “I think this is because I find there so convenient a
shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best
an inhuman world.” Another consuming interest, not unrelated, was eighteenth-century
novels, which she loved for “the preservation of and insistence on a pattern superimposed
precariously on the chaos of human development.”
“I think it is the combination of these two that forms the background of everything
that I write—the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling
inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and
may be intellectual enlightenment.” The Road Through the Wall, she said, “stated this in
miniature, in the factual account of the affairs and concerns of a middle-class
neighborhood where the individuals attempting to progress according to their own limited
visions, were destroyed by their own wickedness.” The recurring theme in all she wrote,
she said, was “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human
behavior.” (125)

But, as if Jackson’s inspiration for The Road was somehow insufficient, Oppenheimer
immediately undermines the seriousness of Jackson’s statement when she continues: “there was
another reason she had written the novel, and years later she told her daughter what it was. ‘The

25
Oppenheimer appears to have read the early book reviews rather than the book itself when she states: “The
Road had its moments but suffered from an unwieldy framework—there were far too many characters roaming
around in Shirley’s suburban neighborhood, diffusing the effect. It was a mistake she would never make again”
(124). And, as she tends to do throughout Private Demons, Oppenheimer overdetermines the autobiographical
aspects of The Road.
107
first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in
you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books’” (125). While Sally
confirms that Jackson certainly succeeded in unnerving her parents, Sally also adds what is the
most accurate assessment of the novel to date: “That book kicked ass” (125). If only scholarly
criticism was so easy.
The Road Through the Wall is vital to understanding how Jackson’s fiction interrupts the
myth of community. The novel actually begins with the myth, in Cabrillo, which is loosely based
on Jackson’s native Burlingame, CA, where she lived until her senior year of high school when
her family moved to Rochester, NY. Oppenheimer suggests that Burlingame was Jackson’s lost
paradise (18), but regardless of Jackson’s personal feelings toward her suburban hometown, from
the opening lines of the prologue, the narrative’s sardonic tone undercuts what critics have
misinterpreted as golden-age nostalgia: “The weather falls more gently on some places than on
others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially
warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some
people are automatically above suspicion” (1).
26
The narrator discloses that for a few of the
families, Pepper Street between Cortez and Winslow Road is only a temporary resting place in
their journey of upward mobility, and the next stop on the way to paradise is the private estate
just beyond the wall. Through the references to Cabrillo and Cortez, two sixteenth-century
Spanish explorers and exploiters of California (Hall, “Fallen Eden” 26), Jackson alludes to a
history of violence that was anything but paradisiacal; through the name Pepper Street, which is

26
Andrea Parke proclaims the novel “gives a nostalgic, truthfully revealing picture of a group of children and
their families” (26). More recently, in “Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall” (1994), Joan
Wylie Hall states: “the setting contains elements of a golden age, but the Eden of the novel is on its way to being
lost from the opening page” (“Fallen Eden” 25). Although Hall acknowledges that the melancholy aspects of the
setting anticipate the suffering to come (25), and even argues that Jackson’s social criticism corresponds with both
Nathanael West’s surreal satire and John Steinbeck’s realistic exposes (26), Hall’s reading too readily accepts
Jackson’s unironic invocation of the Eden myth.
108
a near homonym for “paper street,” Jackson underscores that the Cabrillo-meets-Camelot version
of Burlingame is mere fantasy.
27

Place names aside, Pepper Street could exist anywhere in America in 1936. It is a
neighborhood struggling to maintain its identity by denying the most recent paradigm shifts
brought on by the First World War and the Great Depression. Rather than take stock of an
outdated value system, the majority of Pepper Street residents continue to exclude their own
neighbors according to standards that the younger generation does not even understand, which
Jackson perfectly exemplifies when Helen Williams confusedly mocks Marilyn Perlman, the
daughter of the only Jewish family on Pepper Street, for having two Christmases (17). But this is
not to say that the adults understand their prejudices, let alone consider themselves prejudiced in
the first place. For example, Mr. Desmond presents his wife with the idea of organizing the
neighborhood children to read Shakespeare over the summer break. As the “aristocracy of the
neighborhood” (2), Mr. Desmond explains: “‘It’s absolutely up to people like us to lead the way.
A thing like this ought to include even—’ He stopped, and then said, ‘After all, Shakespeare is
for everyone’” (76). However, when Mrs. Desmond expresses concern that Marilyn might feel
embarrassed if they read The Merchant of Venice, Mr. Desmond takes the opportunity to
rationalize what is clearly a tacit desire to include everyone except Marilyn (religious difference)
and the Martin children (class difference), whom they place on a “Special Reasons” list and

27
Darryl Hattenhauer points out the similarity between “pepper” and “paper” when discussing the narrative’s
concern with textuality (90); however, he declines to consider how “paper street” also refers to a place designated on
a map that, in reality, does not exist. Chuck Palahniuk employs this meaning of the phrase in Fight Club (1996)
when Tyler Durden gives his address on Paper Street and cues the reader that Durden is a figment of the narrator’s
imagination.
109
pretend that they have the children’s best interests in mind.
28
Mrs. Desmond suggests,
humorously, that they include Hester Lucas, or “that girl the Roberts got today,” and at this, Mr.
Desmond can hardly contain his true feelings: “She doesn’t live in the neighborhood . . . . This is
just for the children around here. I won’t even put her down” (78). When they count up the
remaining kids, Mr. Desmond loses his enthusiasm—“I don’t know if there’s a play with only
eight characters” (78)—and they drop the idea altogether.
The truth is, every single person whom Mr. and Mrs. Desmond name lives in the Pepper
Street neighborhood—even Hester Lucas, who is simply new to the neighborhood.
29
When the
Desmonds say neighborhood, what they really mean is a select community within the
neighborhood, which comprises only seven of the eleven households, or a population of twenty-
four adults and children—the same adults and children who later will celebrate together at the

28
Mr. Desmond thanks his wife for pointing out his oversight and erroneously adds that he thinks “there’s one
[a Jew] in Romeo and Juliet, too” (77). Mrs. Desmond then wonders if they could read some other writer but Mr.
Desmond explains that there is “No sense in it unless we read Shakespeare” and justifies his decision to leave
Marilyn out by asserting that Marilyn’s parents “would probably think we just asked her down to insult her. They’re
so touchy, you know” (77). They employ a similar reasoning as they consider the Martin children. Mr. Desmond
first considers Hallie and explains cautiously: “Most of these kids, you can tell that even though they’re young,
there’s stuff in Shakespeare they can get. Mean something to them. But I can’t see Hallie” (78). When Mrs.
Desmond agrees that “She’s quite young,” Mr. Desmond declares that she’s too young and shifts his attention to
Hallie’s brother George: “I can’t see inviting one and not the other of them, can you?” Mrs. Desmond enables her
husband to exclude them both by suggesting: “Perhaps their family wants them to be together . . . . It would be rude
to invite George and not Hallie” (78). Even behind closed doors, the Desmonds maintain the appearance of
neighborliness—they never explicitly say why: Marilyn might be embarrassed, Mr. and Mrs. Perlman would
probably be insulted, or Hallie Martin would not benefit from reading Shakespeare. They also conveniently forget—
as Mrs. Merriam does later—that the Martin’s home life is strained.
29
This statement holds true with the all subdivisions of “neighborhood, I. Concrete uses”—“The people living
near to a certain place or within a certain range; neighbours collectively” (1.a.) through “A community; a certain
number of people who live close together” (3.a.)—the only exceptions are the now obsolete meanings (3.b., and 4.)
and the mathematical definition (5.). There are only two relevant definitions under “Abstract uses,” and perhaps one
could argue that there is an underwhelming number of “Friendly relations between neighbours; neighbourly feeling
or conduct. Now rare (6.a.),” but this is ultimately beside the point because among those individuals that the
Desmonds consider the neighborhood, there is a friendly and neighborly feeling (“neighbourhood | neighborhood,”
n.).
110
Ransom-Jones’s “really neighborhood party” (165).
30
Such exclusionary practices of the
community are especially significant when we remember that Jackson set this novel in the not-
too-distant past, right before the outbreak of the Second World War, in which the logic of Nazi
Germany’s “will to absolute immanence,” not only involved “the extermination of the other, of
the subhuman deemed exterior to the communion of blood and soil,” but as Nancy continues,
also includes:
the logic of sacrifice aimed at all those in the ‘Aryan’ community who did not satisfy the
criteria of pure immanence, so much so that—it being obviously impossible to set a limit
on such criteria—the suicide of the German nation itself might have represented a
plausible extrapolation of the process: moreover, it would not be false to say that this
really took place, with regard to certain aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation. (The
Inoperative Community 12)

Although Jackson does not suggest outright that the Pepper Street community’s will to
immanence might develop into a will to absolute or pure immanence as it did in Nazi Germany,
she does not shy away from drawing connections between the two; after all, Jackson knew all too
well from her own experience of marrying a Jewish man that the perceived threat of the other—
and not just the Jewish other—impacted both sides of the Atlantic. During World War II, the
American government justified moving thousands of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into
relocation camps because they might be a threat to national security. And though the peripheral
character Mr. Lee is Chinese, when he explains to Virginia Donald and Harriet Merriam that the

30
The word “neighborhood” occurs roughly around forty-five times in the novel, and it is usually used to refer
to the exclusive community within, which includes the Desmonds, the Donalds, the Roberts, the Merriams, the
Byrnes, and Miss Fielding. Although Helen and Mildred Williams (before they move) and George and Hallie Martin
are sometimes counted among the neighborhood children—if the children are the ones doing the counting—their
parents and grandparents are certainly not part of the neighborhood. Neither are the Perlmans, the Terrels (after they
move into the house previously rented by the Williams), nor is Hester Lucas during her short stay at the Roberts.
Interestingly, crazy old Mrs. Mack, whom the children call a witch (62), appears to distinguish the “nice
neighborhood” along similar lines (63), despite the fact that she is tolerated, at best, by her neighbors, and not
considered to be a part of their neighborhood: “Mrs. Mack was allowed to continue on Pepper Street (although it
would have been easy enough for Mr. Desmond or Mr. Roberts or even Mr. Perlman to get rid of her), because she
had apparently always owned the little piece of land where she lived; and because she lived in a shack far back from
the street . . . and, finally, because she only ventured outdoors in the very warmest weather, and no one, as far as
even rumor could discover, had ever been harmed by her spells, at least no one who lived on Pepper Street” (62).
The fact that the Jewish Mr. Perlman is listed as one who could get rid of Mrs. Mack, even though he only rents his
house, is very telling of her position within the neighborhood hierarchy.
111
apartment they visit is just his place of employment—“‘I couldn’t rent an apartment in this
house,’ he said. ‘Not in this neighborhood. They wouldn’t rent an apartment to me’” (82)—he
reminds us that the Japanese internment was not an isolated event due to wartime paranoia, but
was instead connected to a long history of prejudice against Asian immigrants.
31

Jackson also draws our attention to the unfortunate truth that in the early twentieth
century, eugenics was very popular in America. In fact, the United States eugenics movement
was not only advanced and funded by highly respected doctors and research foundations, but it
was also instrumental in the development of Nazi eugenics—a detail that has been largely
repressed in American history after Nazi ideology brought the science of racial purity to the
extreme limit.
32
Jackson invokes this disconcerting chapter of American history in two ways; the
first is through Mr. Desmond’s adopted son Johnny, now fifteen years old, who was originally
selected based on “the qualities of health and bodily perfection he [Mr. Desmond] had originally
specified in the child to be adopted” (57). After all, Mr. Desmond explained to his wife years ago
when he first broached the subject of adoption, “It’s not like. . . . we’d take some poor
unfortunate waif and give him a good home” (75). At nearly sixteen years old, John Junior has
much more than the requisite health and bodily perfection, and Mr. Desmond feels as though “he

31
The disappointment that Virginia experiences when she discovers that Mr. Lee is not an exotic self-made man
but merely “the help” reflects her sheltered upbringing and how it has stifled her ability to imagine others beyond
convenient stereotypes (81-82). Conversely, Harriet finds Mr. Lee’s subordinate position a relief, especially after
Mrs. Merriam’s announcement that Chinamen “just love white girls. . . Their houses are made with heavy walls,
extra heavy, so you can’t get out and no one can hear you if you scream” (56). Harriet tries to refute her mother’s
declaration, but for the wrong reasons: “She felt a need to protest; she believed everything her mother was saying,
but that her mother should appear to enjoy it so much . . . ‘I’m sure nothing like that could happen,’ Harriet said”
(56).
32
For a brief history of the U.S. Eugenics Movement and to access the archival material collected from Cold
Spring Harbor, L.I., which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910–1940, visit
eugenicsarchive.org.
112
had been rewarded for his generosity to the child by unexpected good qualities: this strength, a
quiet humor, Johnny’s indefinable self-possession which sometimes awed Mr. Desmond” (57).
33

The second way that Jackson reminds the reader of the United States eugenics
movement—and the discrimination it fostered—is through the community’s response when
twelve-year-old Beverly Terrel, a “feeble-minded” girl, moves to Pepper Street with her mother
and sister midway through the novel. Miss Tyler is the most openly prejudiced toward Beverly;
she refers to her as a “great big animal” (153), and tells Frederica Terrel that her sister “ought to
be put in a home for feeble-minded people” because she’s “apt to become dangerous” (156).
However, it is Miss Fielding who risks endangering Beverly’s life, and she does so by doing
absolutely nothing. Miss Fielding casually watches from her porch as Beverly wanders from her
home unsupervised with a handful of cash, “like an animal that persistently and dumbly walks
against the bars of its cage” (119). A little later, when Frederica Terrel knocks on Miss Fielding’s
door to ask if she has seen her sister—“she runs away sometimes, and it isn’t safe”—Miss
Fielding denies having any knowledge of Beverly’s whereabouts, and as a result, proves to be
one of Jackson’s most terrifying examples of a bad neighbor (121).

Miss Fielding not only
neglects to intervene when Beverly walks off, but she also denies Frederica basic human
courtesy in order to salvage her nightly dinner of boiled eggs and tea. To put this in biblical
terms, Miss Fielding declines to give Frederica the proper respect one reserves for a neighbor
whose animal has gone astray—regardless if the neighbor is a kinsman (Deuteronomy 22.1), or
an enemy (Exodus 23.4).

33
Mr. Desmond’s feelings toward his son are bittersweet, however: “John Junior had not, as so many adopted
children do, grown to resemble his father in subtle ways: he had taken none of his father’s mannerisms, none of his
tricks of dressing, not even many of his father’s words. In some ways he was a sorrow to Mr. Desmond; who
believed, and said often, that adoption was a two-way process. The children should adopt the parents, he would say
soberly, ‘as surely the parents adopt the children’” (56, emphasis added).
113
But Mrs. Merriam proves equally indifferent to the welfare of Hallie Martin, who has
lived next-door all her life. She derives satisfaction, rather than relief or sympathy, from news
that Mr. Perlman had spotted Hallie on the highway trying to hitch a ride to San Francisco and
brought her back home. As far as Mrs. Merriam is concerned, the fact that Hallie tries to run
away is confirmation that she has been right all along about the inferiority of her neighbors
(138).
34
What is especially poignant about Mrs. Merriam’s response is that she subtly assigns
blame to Hallie’s mother because she has a waitressing job (5)—and worse, she works until late
at night (138)—while forgetting that the younger Mrs. Martin is a widow and how this must have
impacted the entire family’s emotional life, let alone its financial stability. Although both
Beverly and Hallie return home safely, these subplots of crises averted produce sideshadows that
expose the dangerous lack of neighboring on Pepper Street, and when viewed retrospectively,
force the reader to recognize that the neighborhood would hardly have reacted the same way if it
had been Beverly or Hallie who had vanished instead of three-year-old Caroline Desmond—and
precisely because they are excluded from the community of common being.
Little Caroline Desmond is not only included in the operative community, but as the
blond-haired miniature of Mrs. John Desmond, Caroline is its symbol, which is why it is
noteworthy that her disappearance and death has many parallels with the 1932 fatal kidnapping
of the twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., “a golden-haired replica of his famous father”
(“Father Searches Grounds” 3). The most obvious links between the two is Caroline’s name,
which is the feminine form of Charles, as well as the fact that she dies from a fractured skull and
her body is found in the wooded area near to her home, albeit within hours, not months, of her

34
When Mrs. Perlman explains Hallie’s mother has not come home yet, Mrs. Merriam says, “‘Of course . . . .
She works until late at night.’ She [Mrs. Merriam] gave the words an inexplicable emphasis, smiling a little” (138).
Mrs. Merriam has a similar response later, after Tod Donald commits suicide.
114
disappearance.
35
Although Mr. Desmond’s local prestige hardly compares with the pilot’s
worldwide fame, Mr. Desmond’s high social standing nonetheless produces an impression of
invulnerability (The Road 1), which is an idea often associated with the heroic “Lucky Lindy”
and is used to account, at least partially, for the collective shock that the whole world seemed to
experience when news broke of his son’s kidnapping. What is particularly interesting about
Jackson’s allusion to this case is that she was writing The Road fifteen years after Charles
Lindbergh, Jr., was fatally kidnapped, and her depiction of Mr. Desmond—and the Desmonds in
general—seems to have been influenced by the subsequent controversy surrounding Lindbergh’s
amiable ties to the Nazi Party, and his well-known collaborations with the famous eugenicist Dr.
Alexis Carrel.
36

Regardless of whether or not aspects of The Road were inspired by the Lindbergh family
drama, the novel nonetheless exhibits how the myth of community thrives in insular

35
Charles Lindbergh’s body was not found until May 12, 1932, ten weeks after he was kidnapped. Another
aspect of the Lindbergh kidnapping that seems to be reflected in The Road—Tod’s suicide, specifically—is the June
11 suicide of Violet Sharpe, a servant in the Lindbergh-Morrow’s home, who failed to give the police a suitable alibi
for her whereabouts on the night of March 1. Sharpe had grown increasingly anxious over the course of three police
interviews, and when she was asked to report for a fourth, she drank poison (“Servant, 28, Takes Poison” 1).
Whether Sharpe knew something or was literally scared to death, we will never know; and thus, the mystery
surrounding the real-life kidnapping sheds little light on Jackson’s fictional whodunit.
36
Lindbergh was an outspoken isolationist and his anti-War advocacy did little to quell the already-growing
concern over Lindbergh’s personal relationship with the Nazi Party and his belief in the superiority of its military
force. For instance, in a 1941 speech in Des Moines, Lindbergh spoke out against the “pro-war policy” of the
American Jews, and though he concedes that “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the
overthrow of Nazi Germany,” such an acknowledgment hardly countered the mounting suspicions of his anti-
Semitism, especially when he went on to say: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and
influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government” (“Isolationist Speeches” 364).
Although I am not suggesting that Jackson was engaging, or anticipating, theories that Lindbergh, under the
influence of Dr. Carrel—a name that incidentally (or ironically), is echoed in Terrel—may have orchestrated his
son’s kidnapping to have him placed in a home (just as Miss Tyler suggests the Terrels should do for Beverly), I do
think that Jackson is a very perceptive reader and may have been inspired by various rumors and reports in the news
about Charles Lindbergh, Jr., possible “imperfections.” Unlike the Lindbergh baby, who was rumored to have
rickets—the county physician who first examined his body stated “it appears that this child had the same unusually
formed toes, the large head, the light curly hair and the same dimensions as those of the Lindbergh child” (“Body
Mile From Hopewell” 3, emphasis added)—there is no indication that Caroline has any physical ailments. However,
Caroline is a strangely quiet three-year-old; while she is present in several scenes, there is not a single mention
(from the narrator or any of the characters) of Caroline talking or babbling—or even just crying. It is quite possible
that Jackson heard the widespread rumor in late 1931 that Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was deaf and had not learned to
talk (Berg 236).

115
neighborhoods like Pepper Street; the only recourse that children have against the authority of
their parents is their neighbors, which is hardly an alternative at all. After all, from the
perspective of the neighborhood within Pepper Street, merely living in close proximity does not
a neighbor make; a neighbor is common being—one who partakes in the ritual of judging and
comparing the capacity for others to conform. Within the logic of communal fusion (Nancy 12),
there is little distinction between a family member, friend, or neighbor, and there is certainly no
love of the neighbor that can be distinguished from love of the same—an unhappy truth for
Harriet Merriam, and a tragic one for Tod Donald. But through characters such as Marilyn
Perlman and Hester Lucas—I will return to Hester shortly—Jackson illustrates that without the
constraint of communal fusion, neighbor love is possible. Marilyn Perlman discovers this when
she is thrust, momentarily, into the unfamiliar position of bystander and watches as Virginia
attempts to intimidate Frederica Terrel on her very first day as a resident of Pepper Street:
Since she and Harriet had been friends they had talked to each other, but suddenly
Marilyn, in the group of children for the first time in her life, found herself outside a
familiar situation; she was one of a group of spectators, watching and participating tacitly
in the torment of an outsider by a Virginia Donald or a Helen Williams. (108)

Marilyn refuses to keep silent because she poignantly remembers Harriet’s tacit participation the
day that Helen Williams had mocked her for being Jewish (17), and she courageously confronts
Virginia: “You just shut up for once in your life and try to act decent” (108). What is especially
unfortunate—although equally unsurprising—is that it is shortly after this incident that Mrs.
Merriam asks Harriet to sever her friendship with Marilyn, and Harriet obliges.
To convince her daughter that Marilyn is an unsuitable companion, Mrs. Merriam
strategically manipulates Harriet’s desire for her mother’s approval by first flattering Harriet—“I
know you are the most generous and tolerant girl around here . . . but remember, what is most
important is not to let yourself get carried away” (148)—and then shaming Harriet with a
116
reminder of the “filthy words, the filthy thoughts” in her unsent love letter to George Martin
(149).
37
Of course, Mrs. Merriam has to manipulate Harriet’s emotions because she has very
little to work with; as she inadvertently reveals, the only objectionable quality that Marilyn
possesses is her religious difference: “We must expect to set a standard. Actually, however much
we may want to find new friends whom we may value, people who are exciting to us because of
new ideas, or because they are different, we have to do what is expected of us” (148). Mrs.
Merriam effectively offers to include Harriet into the “we” of the family, and thus the
community, on the condition her daughter perform a rite of passage and exclude Marilyn: “‘You
may,’ her mother said, in fact I insist,’ she added with relish, ‘that you see her once more, in
order to tell her exactly why you are not to be friends any longer. After all,’ Mrs. Merriam went
on dreamily, ‘she ought to know why she can’t hope to be your friend any longer’” (148-49).
With Mrs. Merriam, Jackson illustrates the illogic of immanence and how it extends from
one generation to the next; and with Harriet, Jackson shows why the next generation chooses not
to question it. Later, when Marilyn responds to Harriet’s painful break-up speech by calling
Harriet a “big fat slob” (158), Harriet uses Marilyn’s reliance on an epithet as evidence of her
own superiority, and as a result, manages to redirect her feelings of confusion and
embarrassment into righteous indignation: “That’s mean, she thought, that was a mean thing to
say, and she shouldn’t have said that. After a little while she stood up and began to walk home
slowly. I’ll tell my mother, she was thinking” (158).

37
At the start of the novel, Mrs. Merriam has already found the unsent love letter that Harriet wrote to George
Martin by breaking into Harriet’s desk and rummaging through her personal writing (11). Mrs. Merriam’s
punishment for the letter incident is disproportionately harsh—she and Harriet religiously burn Harriet’s diaries,
letters, and notebooks in the furnace, one by one (29)—especially in comparison with the other mothers whose
daughters also wrote, and in some cases, sent, similar letters. In fact, it only makes sense if we consider the
likelihood that Mrs. Merriam is not disturbed by the letter as much as by Harriet’s substandard intended recipient,
George Martin, the grandson of the local gardener (5), which is another reason why she brings it up now.
117
But by severing contact with Marilyn, Harriet severs herself from the influence of
Marilyn’s “new ideas,” specifically Marilyn’s capacity to imagine alternative ways of being to
the limited ones they have been exposed to in Pepper Street. Which is not to say that Harriet can
easily wrap her head around Marilyn’s belief in reincarnation, or the mystical connection she
feels with Pantaloon, Rhodomont, Scaramouche, Pierrot, and Harlequin—various characters
inspired from commedia dell’arte that Marilyn has likely read about (111). In truth, Harriet is far
too consumed with her own dismal social life to comprehend that Marilyn can only experience a
sense of belonging through fantasy. Nevertheless, with Marilyn as a friend, Harriet at least has a
chance of escaping the narrow expectations of her mother and her likeminded neighbors, even if
only through her imagination, or at least until she is older. For instance, in the early (and only)
stage of their friendship, when Marilyn suggests that they both write down what they’ll be like in
ten years and bury the papers in a hole they dig near the creek, Harriet takes the task to heart and
writes half a page describing her future self (112-13): “In ten years I will be a beautiful charming
lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the
books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money
and jewels too” (164).
38
Although Harriet’s adolescent dream is not very progressive, it is not
exactly traditional either.
Therefore, when Harriet conforms to her mother’s expectations, she sacrifices the
freedom to author herself and define her own future. Or, in Bakhtinian terminology, Harriet
sacrifices her centrifugal desire when she accommodates her centripetal desire, and by
subscribing to the view that identity is fixed, final, consummated, she submits her identity to

38
We know the contents of their time capsule because Tod discovers the manuscripts in the secret spot shortly
after Harriet and Marilyn make their pact not to look at the manuscripts for ten years (164, 112). If Harriet had
known that Tod had found the manuscripts, perhaps she would find a perverse solace in the full manifestation of her
darker incantation: “A curse be on whoever touches these papers” (113).
118
outside authorial control (Erdinast-Vulcan 62). Although Harriet can diminish the effect of
Marilyn’s insult (“You big fat slob”) because Marilyn is different, Harriet is defenseless when a
similar pronouncement comes from someone within the community, which is precisely what
happens later at the Ransom-Jones’s neighborhood party. In the following conversation, Miss
Tyler not only completes Harriet’s induction into the community but she also determines
Harriet’s place within it.
“It’s a lovely party,” Harriet said.
Ms. Tyler leaned forward and put her hand on Harriet’s arm. “I knew it was a
mistake to have the Roberts people, though,” she said. “She’s very coarse.” She shook her
head sadly and went on, “I can’t imagine why Brad is so polite to her. It’s not in his
nature to be polite to coarse people.”
“He’s very polite.” Harriet said.
“Always be polite,” Miss Tyler said. She looked at Harriet and said, “You’ll never be
pretty, of course, but you can practice great fascination. The pretty ones always fade,
always.” Harriet tried to say something, something self-contained, but Miss Tyler went
on hurriedly, “Take me, for instance, you wouldn’t think now that I was so pretty once.”
She tilted her head flirtatiously, and Harriet said, “Yes, I would think so, Miss Tyler.”
“Nonsense,” Miss Tyler said, and laughed lightly. “His wife is the fascinating one,”
she said, and when Harriet stared, Miss Tyler said, “His wife, Brad’s. My sister. She’s
always been the fascinating one. You’re lucky, you won’t ever be pretty.”
Harriet knew already that this would keep her heartsick for months, perhaps the rest
of her life, and she said thickly, “I’m losing weight right now.”
“It isn’t that you’re so fat,” Miss Tyler said critically. “You just don’t have the air of
a pretty woman. All your life, for instance, you’ll walk like you’re fat, whether you are or
not.” (170)

Miss Tyler is bitter, envious, and full of self-loathing, but Harriet is too naïve and insecure to
question Miss Tyler’s authority, and as a result, takes Miss Tyler’s assessment of her as a life
119
sentence.
39
On the final page of the novel, the narrator sums up Harriet’s adult life: “Harriet
Merriam kept house for her father after her mother’s death; she never married” (194).
Jackson’s depiction of how the relations between women is a disturbingly potent
substratum of an operative community anticipates the work of Luce Irigaray. In an Ethics of
Sexual Difference (1984), Irigaray asserts that love among women has traditionally been a matter
of rivalry and “involves quantitative estimates of love that ceaselessly interrupt love’s attraction
and development”:
Such nagging calculations (which may be unconscious or preconscious) paralyze the
fluidity of affect. We harden, borrow, situate ourselves on the edges of the other in order
to “exist.” As proofs of love, these comparatives eliminate the possibility of a place
among women. We prize one another by standards that are not our own and which
occupy, without inhabiting, the potential place of identity. These statements bear witness
to the affects which are still childish or which fail to survive the death struggle of
narcissism that is always put off: to infinity or else to the hands of a third party as judge.
One of the remarks you often hear one woman say to another woman who is a little better
situated in her identity is: just like everyone else. Here we have no proof of love, but a
judgmental statement that prevents the woman from standing out from an
undifferentiated group. (102–03)

Roughly three generations of women are represented in The Road and the tendency for them to
judge one another runs deep in each. And as Miss Tyler demonstrates when she picks on Harriet,
who must be half her age, the passage of time does little to transform judgmental statements into
actual proofs of love. Perhaps because Miss Tyler has the desire to “exist,” and this is the only
way she knows? One can only conjecture; for, as transparent as Miss Tyler may seem to the

39
There is evidence that Miss Tyler purposely targets Harriet because she is envious of Harriet’s still-open
future, when earlier in the novel, Miss Tyler attends a weekly sewing session at Mrs. Roberts’s house even though
Tyler does not sew. At one point during the conversation, Mrs. Merriam complains that she is having trouble
teaching Harriet how to sew because her daughter is clumsy and does not seem to apply herself (122–23). Miss
Tyler tells Mrs. Merriam that her “little girl will have servants to do everything for her when she grows up,” and
thus admits Harriet will do just fine, at least according to Miss Tyler’s standards. Of course, when she stands face to
face with Harriet, Miss Tyler seems only to recall Mrs. Merriam’s disparaging words. As for Harriet’s failure to
suspect Miss Tyler’s motives, the narrator provides some insight into the general impression that folks in Pepper
Street have of Miss Tyler through Art Roberts’s opinion: “He [Art] knew Miss Tyler as a person of authority, a
grown-up in a children’s world, someone his mother knew” (43).
120
reader, the narrator does not disclose Miss Tyler’s inner thoughts, and Miss Tyler certainly does
not communicate such things aloud. Neither does anyone else.
40

The Road Through the Wall features a significant amount of dialogue but very little
communication, especially among women. As Ruth Franklin points out in the preface of the
novel, nearly all of the action takes place in the world of women and children, after the men have
gone off to work (viii). But within the world of children—adolescents, really—the narrative
reveals a lack of communication among the boys as well. The most meaningful exchange we are
privy to is the one between Art Roberts and Pat Byrne, who, in the quiet seclusion of the area
near the creek, confess their secret hatred of their fathers (52-53). But this “bonding” experience
never progresses beyond the “hypothetical reality” of attachment (Nancy 29), and ultimately, Art
and Pat exchange the generations-old echoes of countless boys who soon will become men: “My
father’s a bully” (repeat); “My father’s a dope” (repeat); . . . “My father’s a bastard” (repeat).
41

Here, we have no being in common or the being-together of singular beings, only the being of

40
In The Road, Jackson exercises what I will venture to call a narrational golden rule, in which the narrator does
unto characters as they do unto others; or, to put it another way, the narrator authors characters who author others. It
is as though the speaker would like to insert just a modicum of (poetic) justice into “what seems to be at best an
inhuman world” (Jackson qtd. in Oppenheimer 125). The narrator—whoever the mysterious speaker is—does not
disclose (or perhaps does not even entertain) the inner thoughts of characters like Miss Tyler and Mrs. Merriam
because they never consider the thoughts or feelings of their neighbors, and therefore, to psycho-narrate the internal
struggles of these authorial characters—assuming they have them—would run the risk of making them more
sympathetic. The speaker practically breaks up with Harriet after Harriet breaks up with Marilyn, which is perfectly
illustrated in the fact that Harriet’s adult life is summed up in a sentence. Along these lines, one could argue that the
narrator keeps a respectful distance from Marilyn and allows her to maintain her own private thoughts—and, more
important, allows her to maintain an open future—because she tries to inhabit the private world of others without
imagining she really knows. With Tod, whom I will soon discuss, things become a bit more murky, particularly
because the narrator’s spotty psycho-narration of this character is what endows the novel with so much ambiguity.
41
The narrator actually prefaces their conversation by explaining: “They spoke only occasionally, without much
regard to communication, in a sort of pleasant comfort that came partly from their familiarity with one another, and
mostly from the feeling of ground and grass under them and trees and sky overhead, with no houses to be seen” (52,
emphasis added). To be clear, this description, and the scene in general, are quite sympathetic; it shows that Art and
Pat both feel constrained by the traditional patriarchy they associate with home. But the narrative also reveals that
what they seek is not actual change, but just the temporary relief of knowing that they are just like everyone else. On
the night that Caroline disappears, Pat returns to the creek as a man when he joins the search party and “walked
with long strides . . . as other men did . . . using words he never dared use before” (184). The narrator signifies Pat’s
traversal from the world of women to the world of men in the moments leading up to the search: “Pat Byrne broke
suddenly away from his mother’s hand, and said loudly, ‘Did anyone tell them about Toddie?’. . . . Pat Byrne was
allowed to walk over to the group of men forming, and say in his deepest voice . . .” (182).
121
togetherness, to borrow from Nancy’s phraseology once again (xxxix). And it is a harmful
togetherness because it never includes Tod Donald:
Whenever Tod had saved a little money from his allowance he would ask Pat Byrne or
Art Roberts to go to the movies or down for a soda with him, his treat; that way, although
they never asked him in return, he had at least their society for a while, and sometimes
even overt friendly gestures. However, if Art and Pat were together, there was no use in
Tod’s asking either or both of them to go with him . . . he could not bear being the lonely
third, the butt of their laughter while he paid for their tickets. (84–85)
42

Unfortunately, nobody ever notices Tod much (33). As the youngest child of three, with
an older brother and an older sister, he is even superfluous in his own family, which,
significantly, is the only five-person nuclear family on Pepper Street. Mrs. Donald, who
“regarded herself as something more than a housewife” chooses, like Virginia, “to save her
ingratiating side for worthy adherents,” and at home, Mrs. Donald is vague and discontented
(125). Nevertheless, she appears satisfied with her first two children, particularly Virginia
because in certain instances they could be mistaken for sisters—a fact that pleases Mrs. Donald
so much that at the Ransom-Joneses’ neighborhood party, she goes so far as to declare: “I don’t
have any daughter . . . . That’s my sister” (172). Mrs. Donald denies Virginia as a daughter but
claims her as a sister; when it comes to Tod, she does not even acknowledge him enough to deny
him. Here is the only time in the entire novel that Mrs. Donald directly addresses her youngest
son, and only because Virginia asks her to:
“I wish you’d make Toddie eat like a human being,” she [Virginia] said.
“Toddie,” Mrs. Donald said automatically, without turning her head. (127).

As for Mr. Donald, he acknowledges nobody at all:

42
Jackson’s choice of the word “society”—as opposed to a word such as “company,” which would better
connote “commonality,” “kinship,” and, most explicitly, the reciprocity of “companionship” Tod really desires—is
significant, especially because this is the only time she uses it in the entire novel. Although I am not suggesting that
through her word choice alone, Jackson intended to invoke Gesellshaft (society) versus Gemeinshaft (community)—
and therefore Nazi ideology—when the narrator explains that Tod will not seek the society of either Pat or Art if
they are together, the connection is there. When comparing being-in-common (being-together) to common being
(being of together), Nancy states: “Nothing indicates more clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can
imply than the role of Gemeinshaft, of community, in Nazi ideology” (xxxix).
122
Perhaps if Tod’s father had been more interested in his children he might have favored
Tod beyond anything he could feel for either James or Virginia, but Stephen Donald
(perhaps, once, like Tod, never like James) had no pity to waste on anything so distant as
his youngest child. There was no recognition, now, in any look Stephen Donald gave the
world; he had absorbed too much disappointment already to jeopardize himself
needlessly for his children. (33)

Tod is completely overshadowed by his older siblings—seventeen-year old James, “the
neighborhood hero” (12), and fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Virginia, the self-appointed queen bee
of Pepper Street—and, thanks in large part to Virginia, he lives in the shadow of the community
at large. Whereas James “privately regarded his younger brother as an imperfect copy of himself,
and was as irritated by Tod as he might have been by any cruel, pointed parody” (33), Virginia
openly ignores him in front of the other children and, as a result, is largely responsible for “Tod’s
lack of existence” (34):
The other children followed Virginia’s example, because she was tacitly assumed to
know, being Tod’s sister. If Virginia had called Tod names, or refused to play with him,
he would have gained prestige as a participant in a family fight, but when she seemed to
believe sincerely that he had never wholly existed, he was lost. If he had been able to do
any single thing better than either his brother or sister, he might have won some small
place in the neighborhood hierarchy, or perhaps even in school; as long as he was the
patient, desperately-clinging minority of the family, he had to be content with the opinion
his family were known to have of him. (34)

The only time that Tod retaliates is when Virginia disregards “neighborhood ethics” and
dismisses Tod in front of her friend on the safety of their own land (35). Possessed of a “desire
for punishment as he had ever achieved,” Tod throws a pebble from the gravel driveway at
Virginia, and then one at Hallie, whom he misses. When Virginia gives him orders—“if you
don’t cut it out you can just go and stay in the house”—and in a tone that indicates she expects
him to obey, his desire for punishment turns into “a sort of frenzy,” and Tod throws a handful of
pebbles as hard as he can into the whole group of girls and nearly puts Mary Byrnes’s eye out
(36). “It was glory of a sort,” the narrator explains, suggesting that for Tod, any attention—even
negative attention—is better than none; however, the narrator also indicates that Tod has little
123
idea what his desire for punishment means: “Tod, wondering vaguely what happened to people
who put other people’s eyes out with rocks,’ said, ‘I’m sorry, again’” (36).
43

Through her parodic depiction of the Donald family, Jackson demonstrates that the
bourgeois patriarchal family as “the wellspring of a specific subjectivity” has run dry (Habermas
43), and shows how the complete elision of the private and public has left Tod completely on his
own.
44
Tod’s identity is presented as if in a state of arrested development; he is neither the same
nor the monstrous other. The narrator explains, “Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or
with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing,
and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along,
never deciding, never helping” (63). When Tod happens to walk by the Desmond home as Mrs.
Desmond drives away, and then happens to sneak into the house (63), Jackson subtly evokes the
passages in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in which the monster recalls how he gained self-
knowledge by secretly watching his “human neighbors” who live in a cottage in the forest (73)—
but only to highlight the discrepancy between Tod and the monster.
Inside the Desmond’s home, Tod moves slowly from the dining room to the living room
and the kitchen. He whistles tonelessly as he vaguely registers his reflection in the shiny surfaces
and makes small, insignificant observations such as “She plays this. It’s their piano” or “Mr.

43
When she is calmer and Tod apologizes sincerely, Mary seems to see him, albeit momentarily, as a fellow
being: “She looked up at him, surprised. ‘That’s all right, Toddie,’ she said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it’” (37).
44
But Jackson does not provide a new model of the family in its stead; rather she demonstrates the need to
rethink traditional ontology, and thus, anticipates the thought of Levinas, Nancy, and Blanchot. Taking Levinas as
his starting point, Blanchot explains: “An ethics is possible only when—with ontology (which always reduces the
Other to the Same) taking a backseat—an anterior relation can affirm itself, a relation such that the self is not
content with recognizing the Other, with recognizing itself in it, but feels that the Other always puts it into question
to the point of being able to respond to it only through a responsibility that cannot limit itself and that exceeds itself
without exhausting itself” (43).
124
Desmond probably likes toast” (64, 65).
45
Compared to Marilyn Perlman, who trespasses into the
Williams’s former rental house looking for incontrovertible proof against Helen’s superior
outward comportment (60–61), Tod is remarkably uncritical of the Desmonds—he does not
doubt that the beautiful interior of the home perfectly corresponds to the beautiful interior of the
family.
The narrator focalizes through Tod but only reports what he sees, touches, smells, and
says aloud to himself, not what he thinks or feels; however, this does not prevent the reader from
understanding the significance of what appears to elude him. Therefore, when Tod makes his
way deeper into the house and discovers the beautiful bedroom Mrs. Desmond shares with
Caroline and the playroom next door with matching, mother-daughter sewing tables, the reader
sees that Mrs. Desmond has cordoned off an area within the house to create a home for just her
and her doll-like daughter. That said, the lack of psycho-narration has major implications for the
reader who hopes to discern the meaning of Tod’s behavior inside Mrs. Desmond’s bedroom,
particularly in light of the conclusion, in which Tod’s suicide is interpreted by many as proof that
he is guilty of killing Caroline. Tod tries on Mrs. Desmond’s perfume and eventually, “wormed
his way through Mrs. Desmond’s dresses and negligees until he reached the most hidden part of
the closet, and . . . . said, quite loudly, all the dirtiest words he knew, all the words he had heard
his brother James ever use, all the words George Martin taught the kids secretly and knowingly”
(67). While Tod’s behavior appears to divulge a disturbing mix of aggression and inchoate

45
Tod sees his reflection in the dining-room table, the coffee service, the coffee-pot, the piano, the toaster, Mrs.
Desmond’s bedroom mirror, and in a gold-framed picture of Caroline (64–66), but he cannot see himself in the
kitchen table “although it was white and shone in the sunlight” (65), which is indicative of his invisibility at his own
family dinners, and links Tod to Merricat, the protagonist of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However,
whereas Tod commits suicide by hanging himself over his dining-room table, Merricat creates her own proper place
at the dining-room table by poisoning almost her entire family over dinner.
125
sexual frustration, it also reveals the extent of his loneliness because it recalls the earlier scene in
which Pat and Art experiment with bad language together.
When Tod exits the house, he lies down in the Desmond’s garden, where he bruises a
blade of grass and then crushes a yellow flower “and rolled the petals cruelly, until the flower
was a little damp ball and he dropped it” (68). Hall views Tod’s conduct in purely sexual terms
and suggests it may “lend credibility to Mrs. Merriam’s malicious gossip about a probable rape,”
and furthermore, that on the night of the Ransom-Jones’s neighborhood party, Caroline’s yellow
dress is “an obvious allusion to the crushed flower” (“Fallen Eden” 29).
46
Darryl Hattenhauer
also cites the garden scene as one of several foreshadowings—including Tod’s name, which
means “death” in German—that implicate Tod, but undecidably so (90). But while Hattenhauer
is correct in saying “Tod’s guilt or innocence would be decidable if the narrator focalized more
thoroughly on Tod’s thoughts. In the limited views of his interior, no thoughts of having killed
her appear, not even indirectly” (90), I hesitate to deem Tod’s flower crushing or stone throwing
as instances of foreshadowing because, as I will explain shortly, it is a mistake to take Jackson’s
use of foreshadowing at face value. Furthermore, there are other characters who make similarly
suggestive gestures, which, with the slightest alteration of the course of events, might appear as
foreshadowing rather than sideshadowing.
47

46
At one point, Hall describes Tod as “Obviously repressed” (28), and yet, she declines to mention that after
Tod bruises the blade of grass and crushes the yellow blossom in the garden, he “must have fallen asleep” because
suddenly, he is painfully aware “of the perfume on his hand, under his face, when the realization of his face reflected
in all those mirrors, shining distorted in the silver coffee-pot, superimposed on Caroline’s picture, frightened him”
(68). Although we are given very few details, Tod’s “realization” seems to indicate that he becomes conscious—
even just partially conscious—of some previously repressed desire, which in turn, weakens the apparently obvious
connections linking Tod to Caroline’s death.
47
The most notable example is Hallie Martin. Early in the novel, as Hallie walks home after the last day of
school while “scuffing the loose sole of her shoe through the pink flowers,” she stops for a few moments to look
across the street at Caroline moving around the flowers; Caroline was “little and delicate and clean, and Hallie was
lean and dirty and wet-faces” (21). As Hallie continues to make her way to Helen Williams’ house, she says to
herself, “‘old Caroline wets her pants’” (22). Lower on the same page, as the narrator describes the Williams’s house
and the grandmother’s dog, Lotus, who snaps at people, we learn that Hallie once wisely stated: “If he snapped at me
I’d kick him in the head and kill him . . . . That’s how you kill dogs anyway, kick them in the head” (22).
126
When Hester arrives in town, Tod’s world changes for the better. In an allusion to
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s infamous Hester Prynne, Jackson’s modern-day Hester is a teenager from
a neighboring town who has been condemned to work as a live-in servant for Mrs. Roberts after
running off and eloping with a man (94). When Tod first sees Hester, he is fascinated by the
thought that Hester has dyed her hair, which seems to represent the malleability of identity. Tod
also seems drawn to Hester’s brutal honesty, which she showcases in their first meeting when
she bluntly assesses the self-pitying Mrs. Roberts and her philandering husband (85). Within
days, Tod’s most earnest desire was to be near Hester, but his attraction to her is not merely
sexual, as Hattenhauer seems to consider it.
48
In fact, the narrator indicates that Tod is initially
drawn to Hester because it is only in her presence that Mrs. Roberts treats him with any maternal
affection. But more generally, Tod is attracted to Hester as the only person who seems to
recognize his existence at all: “He had no idea what he was looking for, or why it seemed that he
might find it through Hester, but she had come with a good omen, Mrs. Roberts’s arm around
him, and her larger-than-life eyes and mouth brought Tod back to her again and again with the
conviction that here, somehow, he might gain back what he had lost by being born at all” (93).
Unfortunately for Tod, the Roberts boys hate Hester—especially Art, who tells his mother all
about “Filthy Lucas” and her runaway marriage (101)—and after just two weeks, Hester is
dismissed (93).

48
Hattenhauer implies this in the passage cited above, in which he lists several foreshadowings that implicate Tod’s
guilt in Caroline’s murder: “When he eavesdrops on Hester and his brother, just before she rejects Tod, he is leaning
against a stone” (90–91). Hattenhauer’s detective work is a bit hasty here and he does not mention that the only
reason that Tod eavesdrops in the first place is because he realizes that Hester is sitting on the porch steps with his
brother James and “Sudden suspicion silenced his steps” (94). Hattenhauer also overlooks the fact that when James
learns that Mr. Roberts had made a pass at Hester in the kitchen, and tells Hester “No sense making trouble,” in a
voice that sounds “disturbed, reluctant,” the stone is mentioned a second time, which further intensifies the
suspicious behavior of James, not Tod: “The night air, and the cold stone, and his brother’s voice, made Tod shiver”
(94). When James leaves and Tod reveals himself to Hester, their conversation is rather endearing; Hester treats Tod
like a kid brother, which is more than he can say about his own siblings, and her reaction to Tod after he tells her
“‘I’d like to be married to you,’” is completely consistent with this rapport and hardly seems like a rejection (96).
127
On Hester’s last night in town, Mrs. Roberts allows her to join the neighborhood children
in their nightly game “because there seemed to be no possible harm she could do” (99). The
same could not have been said of the neighborhood children, which Hester only discovers after
accepting an invitation to join a game of Tin-Tin—a game “probably as old as children” (99),
and “that filled some deep undefined need in neighborhood life” (100).
49
According to ritual,
It—currently Virginia Donald—selects a secret name or nonsense syllable and whispers it into
the ear of the victim, and after the introductory call and response of—“Tin-Tin. / Come in. /
Where will I get the money for my tin?”—It can continue to ask any “personal or outrageous or
hilarious question, to all of which the victim must answer with his idiot name. The object, of
course, to make the victim laugh” (100). When Virginia Donald cruelly names Hester “Art
Roberts,” Hester’s persecutor in reality, Hester hesitates before answering Virginia’s first
question, and in the silence:
it occurred to Hester that the evening was focusing on her; tomorrow night she would not
be here, last night she had not been allowed to play, and in ten years, wherever she was,
whatever she was doing to keep alive, these children would still be quietly growing,
protected and sheltered with the strong houses of their parents and the quiet assumption
that streets were made for them to sit on. It occurred, certainly, to Hester for the first
time, that regardless of what she and Mrs. Roberts thought of one another, and whatever
cruel vengeance operated between the Hesters and the Mrs. Robertses, Virginia Donald
definitely and automatically thought of herself as superior. Mr. Desmond might be
diplomatic and tolerant, Mrs. Ransom Jones indifferent, James Donald awed and
reluctant, although somehow accessible, but Virginia Donald stood calmly looking down
on Hester, as she always had and always could. (102)

In this incredible moment, Hester views her situation from the outside and through the
perspective of history and she defies the apparent inevitability of her situation. When Hester
finally answers, she loudly declares her secret name as “Mike Roberts”—the name of Art’s

49
The narrator’s commentary on Tin-Tin is revealing of Jackson’s treatment of traditional ballads in “The
Daemon Lover” and Hangsaman. The narrator explains: “Wherever children congregate they will probably have
their own version of Tin-Tin, its elaborate ritual determined by the children and their fathers and their grandfathers
operating individually on an immutable theme. Pepper Street’s Tin-Tin was as nonsensical as most; the entire
introductory ritual had lost its meaning and probably its accompanying dance” (99).
128
father—and thus, she interferes with the process of ritual persecution. Virginia protests, “That’s
not the name I gave you,” but, with Mrs. Roberts as a witness, Hester just says “Mike Roberts”
again and again, and the final time with laughter. With this simple but powerful gesture, Hester
collapses the boundary between the world of children and the world of adults; she not only
refuses to be Virginia’s victim, but she also refuses to become the Roberts’s scapegoat when she
reminds the entire town that the reason that Mrs. Roberts and Art are unhappy is because Mike
Roberts is an unfaithful husband and an overbearing father. The neighborhood responds to
Hester as one might expect: Mrs. Roberts tells her boys to come home at once, but they are
already halfway across the street, and the other children “started quietly up or down the block,
across the street, into their houses, anywhere away from Hester and the unmentionable thing she
had said”—everyone except for Tod Donald, who chants, “You lost, Hester, you laughed. Hey,
everyone, she laughed” (102–03). Although sadly, the one person who might have learned from
Hester’s small act of insubordination adheres to the rules of the game even after it is over, Hester
can leave Pepper Street on her own terms and without the burden of a scarlet letter.
Before the summer begins, Pepper Street had already experienced an “invasion” from the
northwest quarter when an apartment building had “stolen around the corner near the Desmond
house to have an address on Cortez Road; it had even gone so far as to stretch a numbered
awning out across the sidewalk” (6). Next there was the incident with the letters, for which Mrs.
Merriam blames Helen Williams (30), and although Helen Williams moves away—much to Mrs.
Merriam’s relief—Hester Lucas arrives shortly thereafter, and, as Mr. Desmond’s disgust at just
the mention of her name exhibits (78), Hester is viewed as a shoddy replacement for Helen
Williams. When the Terrels move into the Williams’s old rental immediately after Mrs. Roberts
129
gets rid of Hester Lucas, there is little doubt that these have all been signs prefiguring Pepper
Street’s degradation.
And then the news comes that a part of the wall is going to come down:
One morning a severely thoughtful man, a business man like Mr. Desmond, and a cross
old lady in a paneled living-room, from the depths of their own private unowned lives,
made a decision with the words and paper so necessary for momentous decisions, and
never consulted Mr. Desmond or Mr. Ransom-Jones, never thought of asking Tod
Donald, who was the one most terrible changed by it all.
Part of the wall was to come down. A breach was to be made in the northern
boundary of the world. Barbarian hordes were to be unleashed on Pepper Street. A
change was going to come about without anyone’s consent. In ten years, the people now
living on Pepper Street could come back and not know the old place, it would be so
changed. . . . . instead of the wall running from the gates to the highway, there would be a
wall running to Pepper Street and then along a new street on the estate to meet the wall
which ran down the other side, a smaller square than before, and, in the end so cut off,
new houses. And the people who lived on the corresponding street, who saw their own
familiar wall going down? Probably they felt the same way, and were apprehensive of the
barbarian hordes from Pepper Street. The really comfortable people would be the ones
who moved into the new apartment house which was to go up in the empty space; to
them, nothing was different.
Eventually a third man broadened Pepper Street by taking down the locust trees, and
a fourth man changed its name to Something Avenue, but this was much later, late
enough to astound the people in the new apartment house, who came back in their turn
and found it hard to recognize the old neighborhood. (130–31)

What are we to make of this passage, in which the speaker’s temporal omniscience not only
confirms the inevitability of Pepper Street’s decline and eventual displacement but also indicates
the general predictability of community development, expansion, degradation, urbanization, and
so on? Just as in the prologue where the narrator parodically introduces the story of Pepper Street
as the story of a paradise lost, at the end of Chapter Four, the narrator employs a similar parodic
tone to prepare the reader for its fall. In the final chapters of The Road, it becomes increasingly
apparent that Jackson uses foreshadowing self-consciously to draw the reader’s attention to the
ways in which the neighborhood interprets the events of the summer in 1936 as if predetermined
130
by myth.
50
For instance, when the news breaks about the construction on the wall, there is dismal
foreboding in the Martin household (134), and in anticipation of hard times, Mrs. Martin asks her
widowed daughter-in-law and two grandchildren to move out (150). Mrs. Mack portends
calamitous ruin from reading the Bible’s prophetic books aloud to her dog, Lady (88, 122, 152,
192). And on the other side of the spectrum, Mr. Desmond considers this perhaps a chance to
move forward in the world, and
for the first time Mr. Desmond thought practically of moving; careful examination of his
bank account assured him that he was not ready to go beyond the gates at present without
a cautious economy of home and life that would almost nullify the good effects of
moving. Borrowing money was an aversion of Mr. Desmond’s, but any removal not
beyond the gates would be a step backwards. (131–32)

Although the Ransom-Joneses have a far less dramatic response—they discuss the
advisability of a high and firm hedge around their garden (132)—they nonetheless view the
change as inevitable, and after the construction begins, they throw a neighborhood party. When
Mrs. Ransom-Jones first explains the reasoning behind the celebration, she tells Mrs. Desmond
“We thought it was a shame that all of us had never gotten together in a really neighborhood
party before” (165); a little later, she says to both Mrs. Desmond and Mrs. Merriam: “I suppose
it’s to celebrate the wall coming down . . . . After all, the old neighborhood will never be the
same again” (168). Of course, the irony of this comment is that the old neighborhood was never
the same to begin with, which is why several residents of Pepper Street between Winslow and
Cortez are not invited.

50
My reading of The Road is influenced by Morson’s discussion of what he calls negative narration in his
discussion of foreshadowing in Anna Karenina (1877). Although Jackson’s style is quite different than Tolstoy’s, I
believe that Morson’s observations are applicable: “Tolstoy deeply distrusted not only conventional plots but also
plotting per se because they both impose closure and structure on a world that is fundamentally innocent of both.
And yet he also was aware that novels must have some structure and something like a coherent plot if they are to be
readable at all. Therefore, he gives the structuring impulse to his character. . . . Tolstoy’s fundamental solution to the
problem of escaping plot and the lie of the essential surplus was to develop various forms of negative narration”
(79–80).
131
The exclusivity of the neighborhood party is reason to disagree with Hattenhauer when
he argues “The neighborhood ritualizes the breaking of the wall with a suburban version of
carnival, with normal staid adults getting drunk, flirting with minors, and becoming aggressive.
Michael Holquist says that for Bakhtin, ‘carnival, like the novel, is a means for displaying
otherness” (95). Despite the ambiguity surrounding Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, it is
clear that the neighborhood party does not meet the criteria of even a suburban carnival; for, as
Bakhtin explains, “All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category
goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. This is a very important aspect of a
carnival sense of the world. People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical
barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square” (Problems 122–23). Furthermore,
Hattenhauer exaggerates the display of so-called otherness at the party; the slightly rowdy group,
which consists of Mrs. Donald and Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, Mr. Ransom-Jones, and
eventually Mr. Desmond, are in the kitchen drinking properly alcoholic refreshments in “almost
frank rivalry” to the intoxicating punch being served outside—a punch that Mrs. Roberts
declares as suitable for old ladies (169). No one in the kitchen behaves in a particularly
surprising way, except perhaps Mr. Roberts, who dances with Virginia Donald in front of
everyone, but it is his openness, not his behavior, that could possibly be deemed uncharacteristic
(173). And the people outside, such as Miss Tyler and Mrs. Byrne, disapprove of the kitchen folk
predictably.
51

51
Mr. Donald acts exactly as expected and does not partake in the merriment in the kitchen; in fact, when Mr.
Ransom-Jones first brings Mrs. Roberts into the kitchen to find something more appropriate to drink, “they found
Mr. Donald, who had crept there to eat his chicken sandwiches, and drove him outside where he was captured by
Mrs. Byrne and given a lecture on not acting in time to save Pepper Street (169). But the moment that best
exemplifies the tameness of the so-called carnival spirit of the party is when Harriet Merriam is looking for her
father and Mr. Desmond directs her to the kitchen pantry, which “suggested unimaginable horrors to Harriet, but she
opened the pantry door and went cautiously in. Her father was sitting alone on an overturned dishpan. He had a full
glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and his eyes were half-closed. He was humming to himself, and smiling”
(173).
132
Jackson underscores that even a potential crisis fails even temporarily to bridge the
distance between the neighborhood and the community, and more important—and somewhat
paradoxically—to disrupt the characters’ general tendency to view themselves from afar, as if
they were participating in an already scripted drama and it was just a matter of finding out which
one. After Mr. Desmond canvasses the neighborhood looking for Caroline—he knocks on
everyone’s door, including the Terrels, the Martins, the Perlmans, and Mrs. Mack, who had not
been invited to the party—several of the Pepper Street residents gather on what was traditionally
their forgotten village green (181). But there are many people absent; Miss Fielding does not
have the courtesy to open her door to Mr. Desmond (176), Mr. Roberts is too drunk to leave
home (193), and Mr. Donald, whose house is directly behind the village green, remains in his
open doorway with a book in his hand (183). Frederica Terrel, who (understandably) watches
from her front steps, sees Mr. Donald and thinks “Why doesn’t he go indoors . . . they’ve got
enough people standing down there” (183). And those who do gather together on the green
were waiting for something, for an act on someone’s part that would clarify the situation.
No one could do anything at all until the occasion was identified—either it was a great
climactic festival, over nothing, in which case they would all go quietly home, or else it
was an emergency, a crisis, a tragedy, in which case they were all called upon to act
together as human beings, to be men and women in a community, the men out of
dangerous business, the women waiting, going to the window, wringing their hands.
(181)

Mr. Merriam suggests the men should get flashlights and begin to look for Caroline, but
Mr. Ransom-Jones is more cautious and suggests they wait for the police. Just as it seems that
James Donald might take charge, Pat Byrne comes forward and informs them “Tod Donald; he
came trying to see me on his bike tonight and he acted awfully funny” (182). After Mr. Donald
confirms that Tod is not home, Mrs. Donald wails “Toddie . . . My little baby” (183)—much to
Virginia’s embarrassment—and it is finally Mr. Perlman,
133
who had been so quiet until now, waiting with a flashlight in his hand for someone to
start off into the dark, said the thing which everyone realized had been in their minds. “If
the two children are together,” Mr. Perlman asked reasonably and softly, “why didn’t the
boy bring her home?”
They were all silent, realizing that the first person who spoke now would have to say
something worse, something else they were all thinking, something which, whether true
or not, would be the most horrible thing that had ever happened on Pepper Street.
It was Mr. Desmond, rightfully, who cracked the tense film of comprehension that
lay like the pale yellow of the street light over all the people waiting . . . “What has he
done to my little girl?” (183–84).
52

All this time, Tod is hiding behind the wall at the construction site; although he thinks people
might be looking for him, “the principal reason he had not run out and said ‘Here I am,’ was his
fear of the sudden surprise and the humiliating laughter when they saw him and realized that he
thought they were looking for him” (185). The “Here I am” that Tod thinks is striking. Levinas
proffers the “here I am” as the primordial utterance, the response to responsibility, because it is
the response to God by Abraham, Samuel, Isaiah, and more (Robbins 9). Therefore, Tod’s “Here
I am” underlines the impossibility of his situation: the sad fact that no one has been here for Tod,
and the tragic truth that Tod will be the only one to answer for the most horrible thing that ever
happened on Pepper Street.
Regardless of Tod’s involvement in Caroline’s death, whether he is responsible, an
unwitting witness, or completely oblivious that it happened, his suicide is taken as a confession
of guilt. There are, however, a few people who have their doubts. We know from Mrs. Byrne that
Pat thinks it was an accident (192), which actually recalls his response when Tod throws pebbles
at his sister and his friends and hits Mary. Mr. Merriam and Mr. Perlman, who run into one
another while visiting the crime scene, are both having trouble making sense of evidence, and
approach it sensibly,

52
Notice that the yellow light—the color so often associated with Caroline Desmond, and the color of Tod’s
incriminating crushed flower—is cast over everyone.
134
“I was just looking around,” Mr. Merriam said. “I just had an idea I’d kind of like to look
around.” He laughed uncomfortably. “Suppose the police have covered everything pretty
thoroughly,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Mr. Perlman said. “Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?”
“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Merriam said. “It just doesn’t seem quite right.”
“He was too small, for one thing,” Mr. Perlman said eagerly. “You can’t tell me a boy
that small could heft a rock that big. Stands to reason.”
“No,” Mr. Merriam said quietly. “No, I thought of that.”
“Just isn’t possible. And another thing, he came home. Wouldn’t have done that.”
“You know,” Mr. Merriam confided, “Desmond’s been saying the kid had blood all
over his clothes. Well, now, I was one of the people saw Tod when he came home. . . .
There was not one spot of blood on him. Not a spot.”
“Well, then, that’s another thing,” Mr. Perlman said. “He’d have gotten some blood
on him, wouldn’t he?”
“You know what I think?” Mr. Merriam said, “I think it was a tramp. Some
Godforsaken old bum just hanging around down here. Never did like the kids playing up
here, it’s a natural place for tramps to hang out.” (190–91)

This conversation is reminiscent of the one between Art Roberts and Pat Byrne, the two men are
echoing each other, not communicating, and Mr. Merriam concludes with a woefully typical
answer: it was a tramp. To their credit, they question the evidence, but it does not lead
anywhere—not even to a conversation about their daughters, who played here together when
they were friends, and question why it is that they should not be friends again.
53

What Jackson reveals at the end of The Road is Pepper Street’s inability to acknowledge
what it cannot make meaning of. Without acknowledging that Tod and Caroline’s deaths reveal
the impossibility of immanence, there can be no sharing, no communication, and thus no
community (Nancy, The Inoperative Community 15).

53
Jackson actually focuses on all three members of the Merriam family at the conclusion of The Road. Mrs.
Merriam feels so mad to think of Tod getting off so easy (191), and when Mrs. Byrne raises the possibility of
Caroline’s death being an accident, she says: “‘Think about that boy, think about how he acted all the time. He was
always strange. I remember myself, noticing how strange he always was. And then think about the facts they’re not
giving out. Mark my words . . . even if the killing was an accident, there were other things about it that were not
accidental.’ She tightened her lips and looked triumphant” (192).
And Harriet, who wakes up with a recollection of disaster, “Looking around her sunny room with her head still
on the pillow, she searched for the source of the flat dead feeling inside her, the knowledge of despair. Something
had happened. She remembered slowly; standing in the street she remembered clearly, and coming home alone to
bed in the darkness, and, before that, the people in the street, and Mr. Desmond. Mr. Desmond is a part of it, at last it
came to her: he was standing laughing in the kitchen when she went by, following Miss Tyler into the house to hear
. . . fat” (189, emphasis added).
135
Chapter Four: “Somewhere between here and there”: Neighboring Narratives in The Lottery
When “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, and aroused an
“unprecedented outpouring of fury, horror, rage, disgust, and intense fascination” from readers
across the country, Farrar Straus sought to capitalize on the notoriety of this story and moved
quickly to publish the collection under this title (Oppenheimer 129, 132). In 1949, twenty-five
short stories, seventeen of which had been previously published (Hall, A Study 3), were released
as The Lottery or, The Adventures of James Harris. If the subtitle helped to thwart the
expectations of some readers that the rest of the stories in The Lottery would resemble its
namesake, it backfired for others; in his New York Times review of the book, critic Donald Barr
complains that “the erudite quotations which adorn it and the recurring use of the name James
Harris give a false unity to the book and confuse the meaning of individual stories” (4). But
Farrar Straus’s later decision to drop the subtitle has had its detractors as well. In Shirley
Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction, Joan Wyle Hall argues that the deletion of the collection’s
subtitle obscures the most obvious link that aligns The Lottery with other collections that Susan
Garland Mann identifies as a short story cycle (4).
Barr and Hall are concerned with essentially the same question: how unified is this
collection? And the answer lies, of course, somewhere between their opposing views. Jackson’s
recurring allusions to the two seventeenth-century texts—Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus
Triumphatus and the British ballad “James Harris, (The Daemon Lover)”—do not impart the
same level of meaning to each story, but they do function as ghostly leitmotifs throughout the
collection, underscoring the persistence of repressive patriarchal discourse in the present.
Furthermore, while one need not qualify The Lottery as a short story cycle, Jackson’s reference
to Saducismus Triumphatus allows us to see that, similar to a demonology book, The Lottery
136
might be viewed as a compilation of relations, or narratives, about neighborly relations. Along
similar lines, we might extrapolate from Jackson’s allusion to “James Harris, (The Daemon
Lover),” which is included in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), and
view The Lottery as a collection of modern border ballads in which the border in question is that
of the operative community.
1

As the title of this chapter suggests, the stories that I have selected from The Lottery do
concern the threshold of community, and might be grouped into two rough narrative
configurations. The first (“The Daemon Lover” and “Pillar of Salt”) feature protagonists who are
figuratively dislocated from their tentative position on the margins of community, and the second
(“Like Mother Used to Make” and “Flower Garden”) involves a protagonist who is betrayed by,
or must betray, a neighbor in order to secure his or her position within community. This grouping
is purposefully general and unstable; “Like Mother Used to Make” is as connected to “The
Daemon Lover” as it is to “Flower Garden,” if not more, and “The Intoxicated”—which will be
the first story I discuss—does not quite fit into either configuration, and yet, it prepares the
reader for the road ahead. Therefore, I will be discussing these stories in the order that they
appear, beginning with the first three stories in Section I of The Lottery: “The Intoxicated,” “The
Daemon Lover,” and “Like Mother Used to Make,” and then “Flower Garden,” which is from
Section II, and finally, “Pillar of Salt” from Section IV.
“The Intoxicated”

“Well, after all . . . it isn’t as though we didn’t know about it in advance.”
—Eileen

1
I am using the term “border ballad” figuratively. Traditionally, it refers to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
ballads from the “Debatable Lands” on the Anglo-Scots borders (Scott 19).
137
“The Intoxicated,” which is the opening story of The Lottery, functions as a bridge from
the self-enclosed world of Pepper Street in 1936, to the series of sliding doors opening out from
the suburban living-room where Eileen’s parents are hosting a party. The focal character is an
unnamed man in his early thirties and as he moves from the party toward the kitchen to sober up,
the group at the piano sings “Stardust,” a nostalgic lament of lost, paradisiacal love. It is only
after he sits down at the kitchen table that he sees Eileen, the seventeen-year-old daughter of his
hosts, “regarding him speculatively” across the table. The dialogue that ensues between the high
school senior and the partygoer, who uncertainly represents her parents’ generation, acclimates
the reader to the tentative postwar atmosphere that pervades The Lottery.
When Eileen explains she is writing a paper on the future of the world, she offers a more-
than-sobering prognosis:
“I don’t really think it’s got much of a future,” she said, “at least the way we’ve got it
now”
“It’s an interesting time to be alive,” he said, as though he were still at the party.
“Well, after all,” she said, “it isn’t as though we didn’t know about it in advance.”
He looked at her for a minute; she was staring absently at the toe of her saddle shoe,
moving her foot softly back and forth, following it with her eyes. “It’s a frightening time
when a girl sixteen has to think of things like that.” In my day, he thought of saying
mockingly, girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking.
“I’m seventeen,” She looked up and smiled at him again. “There’s a terrible
difference,” she said.
“In my day,” he said, overemphasizing, “girls thought of nothing but cocktails and
necking.” (5)

Eileen disregards his comment and simply replies that his generation’s escapist tendency is
partly the trouble: “If people had been really, honestly scared when you were young we wouldn’t
be so badly off today” (5–6). The man again tries to diminish Eileen’s meaning by positing that
being scared about the future is merely an effect of growing up, “a stage you go through, like
being boy-crazy,” but undeterred, Eileen continues,
“I keep figuring how it will be.” She spoke very softly, very clearly, to a point just past
him on the wall. “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire
State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly
138
into the water with the people inside. And the schools, in the middle of Latin class
maybe, while we’re reading Caesar.” She brought her eyes to his face, looking at him in
numb excitement. “Each time we begin a chapter in Caesar, I wonder if this won’t be the
one we never finish. Maybe we in our Latin class will be the last people who ever read
Caesar.” (6)

The man tells Eileen “it’s a little silly . . . to fill your mind with all this morbid trash. Buy
yourself a movie magazine and settle down” (6). Eileen does not miss a beat and mordantly
incorporates movie magazines and other material frivolities into her vision: “The subways will
crash through . . . and the little magazine stands will all be squashed. You’ll be able to pick up all
the candy bars you want, and magazines, and lipsticks and artificial flowers from the five-and-
ten, and dresses lying in the street from all the big stores. And fur coats” (6–7). Eileen tells him
that the reset button on humanity will be pushed, “If only you could know exactly what minute it
will come” (7). The man suddenly realizes that Eileen is including him,
“I see,” he said. “I go with the rest. I see.”
“Things will be different afterward,” she said. “Everything that makes the world like
it is now will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there’ll be a
law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.”
“Maybe there’ll be a law to keep all seventeen-year-old girls in school learning
sense,” he said, standing up.
“There won’t be any more schools,” she said flatly. “No one will learn anything. To
keep from getting back where we are now.” (7)

With his shoulder on the swinging door, the partygoer hesitates between the kitchen and
the living room, “He wanted badly to say something adult and scathing, and yet he was afraid of
showing her that he had listened to her, that when he was young people had not talked like that”
(7). Instead of saying something scathing, the man draws the conversation to a close by offering
to give Eileen a hand with her Latin if she ever needs it, and Eileen giggles and, “shocking him,”
explains that in spite of the world’s immanent demise, she still does her homework every night
(7). When he returns to the party, the group at the piano sings “Home on the Range,” an
139
American folk song so laden with revisionism that the song’s very history captures the
mythopoeic function of the American pastoral in action (ed. Hamilton and Jones 161).
2

What are we to make of Eileen’s dark vision? Much of Jackson’s commercial success
came from her ability to write in a lighthearted, satirical tone—a talent that certainly comes
through in her family chronicles and stories such as “Charles” (1948), which was reprinted in
The Lottery—but in the historical context of the Second World War and the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), “The Intoxicated” is more unsettling than even her darkly
satirical novel The Sundial (1958). Yet, unlike the woefully self-righteous individuals who await
the apocalypse in The Sundial with plans to create an equally corrupt hierarchy in its aftermath,
Eileen declines to prescribe the path to a better future with the exception of one condition: it
must look different from the present. Therefore, Eileen seems to be a mouthpiece for Jackson;
she interrupts myth when she recasts an Old Testament-style allegory as a spooky ghost story—
“If only you could know exactly what minute it will come” (7).
But though Eileen may have interfered with her interlocutor’s attempts to pine for an age
where boy-crazy girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking, other representatives of
traditional patriarchy at the party are introduced when the unnamed man seeks out his hosts to
compliment them on their daughter. The protagonist sees Eileen’s mother “deep in earnest
conversation with a tall, graceful man in a blue suit,” and approaches the father instead and says,
“I’ve just been having a very interesting conversation with your daughter.”
His host’s eye moved quickly around the room. “Eileen? Where is she?”
“In the kitchen. She’s doing her Latin.”
“Gallia est omnia divisa in partes tres,” his host said without expression. “I know.”
“A really extraordinary girl”
His host shook his head ruefully. “Kids nowadays,” he said. (8)

2
For a concise history of “Home on the Range,” see the Encyclopedia of the Environment in American
Literature (160–61).
140
While at first this may seem like a harmless exchange, the host divulges the partygoer’s
unspoken anxiety when he too quickly dismisses his daughter’s extraordinariness, and his rueful
“Kids nowadays” proves more ominous than Eileen’s catastrophic visions.
3

Through allusions to World War II, Manifest Destiny, and even Caesar’s conquest of
Gaul, Jackson subtly conjures a long history of violence, but the most poignant intertextual
reference in a story about a nonconforming young woman is the Glanvill epigraph.
4
I imagine it
must be rather startling for those curious readers, unfamiliar with demonology, to discover that
the quote comes from the 1664 confession of an accused witch named Alice Duke who is
describing her coven’s gatherings with the devil. Out of context, it is difficult to envision the
coercive methods regularly used to obtain such confessions (Levack 15–18); the high execution
rates of those prosecuted (21–24); and finally, how these testimonies were gathered and
classified by elite men such as Glanvill in order to prove the existence of the devil, and in turn,
God (Briggs 99–100).
5
Rather, on its own, the epigraph simply prepares the reader for the party
atmosphere in the story: “He bids them Welcome at their coming, and brings Wine or Beer,
Cakes, Meat, or the like. . . . They eat, Drink, Dance, and have Musick. At their parting they use
to say, Merry meet, merry part” (qtd. in Hall 7). For those who recognize Alice Duke’s refracted
voice from the past, it becomes all the more difficult to downplay Eileen’s sobering urgency.

3
In A Study of the Short Fiction, Joan Wylie Hall explains that “Earlier versions of ‘The Intoxicated’” end on a
more clearly threatening note,” and quotes what she believes is the earliest of three drafts:
“Suddenly in his host’s eyes and tightened mouth he found the fear, the insistent nagging, (‘When
they come, when they come with their songs and their bright new words, with their gaiety and
their cruelty, where will we hide? What will preserve us, who will protect us, what can save us
then?’).
And he said brightly, looking down into his glass, ‘She’s going to be a fine woman,
someday’” (Jackson qtd. in Hall 10).
4
This epigraph is not included in the American edition of The Lottery, which only has three epigraphs,
beginning with Section II; however, all four epigraphs are included in the British edition (Hall, A Study 92n.17).
What is odd about Farrar Strauss’s decision to cut the first epigraph from the American edition of The Lottery is that
it contains the expression “merry meet, merry part,” which was second choice as the title for the collection.
5
As Brian P. Levack says, “If we need one word to describe the witch in the early modern period, we might
refer to her as a nonconformist” (162).
141
In earlier drafts of “The Intoxicated,” the hostess converses with a “heavy-faced man in a
grey suit” rather than the Harris-like figure of the final version (qtd. in Hall Short Fiction 10).
With this small revision, Jackson captures the moment that Harris infiltrates the walls of Eileen’s
childhood home. Although Eileen seems resistant to the self-doubt that overcomes the
protagonist of “The Daemon Lover,” the next story in the collection, Eileen is young and
idealistic and has yet to navigate through a stubbornly patriarchal culture. As dissimilar as Eileen
may seem to the unnamed protagonist of “The Daemon Lover”—and to various protagonists in
The Lottery, perhaps with the exception of Marcia from “Like Mother Used to Make”—at the
end of “The Intoxicated,” Jackson sets in motion a series of sliding doors in Eileen’s living room
and it is conceivable that one of them will open up into the New York City apartment of a thirty-
four-year-old woman desperate to revise her narrative through the traditional marriage plot that
James Harris seems to represent.
6

“The Daemon Lover”
“I get a couple of ideas together and they are very exciting. ‘Demon Love’ [sic] started that way.
Someone told me an anecdote, just a few sentences. (Sort of like Henry James, you know.) I like
thinking about it, turning it around, thinking of ways to use a situation like that in order to get a
haunting note. It gets quite real. I think of what other thing it will go with, while I’m washing the
dishes. But I do it because it’s fun, because I like it.”
—Shirley Jackson
7

“The Daemon Lover” is a revised version of “The Phantom Lover,” which was first
printed in Woman’s Home Companion earlier in 1949. According to Lenemaja Friedman, in the
earlier version of the story, “James Harris appears to be an actual man who jilts his sweetheart on
their wedding day; in the revised version, which is narrated from the point of view of the thirty-

6
In Hangsaman, Jackson thematizes sliding-doors when Natalie, who is the same age as Eileen, reflects:
“seventeen years was a very long time to have been alive, if you took it into proportion by the thought that in
seventeen years more—or as long as she had wasted being a child, and a small girl, silly and probably playing—she
would be thirty-four, and old. Married probably. Perhaps—and the thought was nauseating—senselessly afflicted
with children of her own. Worn, and tired” (9).
7
This is from a 1949 interview with the New York Times (“Talk With Miss Jackson” 1).
142
four-year-old heroine, the reader has cause to suspect that Harris may be either a product of her
imagination or a phantom appearing momentarily to plague his victims and then disappear” (50).
Friedman’s commentary is important because it reveals that Jackson revised the story to increase
the ambiguity and to highlight its intertextuality; while the original title may have suggested a
link to Vernon Lee’s fantastic story, “Oke of Okehurst; or, the Phantom Lover” (1886), the less
ambiguous representation of Harris as an actual man in Jackson’s original version would have
likely obscured any potential connection to Lee’s tale about a woman in love with a ghost.
Although the title “The Daemon Lover” minimizes its possible relevance to Lee’s
“Phantom Lover,” it explicitly announces the story’s engagement with several historical and
literary demon lovers. And, by enhancing the narrative indeterminacy of “The Daemon Lover”
through a third-person limited narrator who stays unusually close to the unnamed protagonist,
Jackson allows for more interplay between fantasy and reality, and a greater degree of
convergence between the past and the present, which is significant because, as I will ultimately
argue, Jackson uses the demon lover trope to critique the popular career girl narrative. In
comparing “The Daemon Lover” to “The Private Life of Gwyned Filling” (1948), Life
Magazine’s photo-essay that both captured and influenced the postwar communal response to
women in the workplace, my hope is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate how Jackson’s
narrative is sideshadowing the dominant narrative, in which a young woman’s career is just a
temporary sidetrack to the traditional marriage plot, and as a result, “The Daemon Lover”
demonstrates the need for feasible alternatives. Second, I want to offer a reading of “The
Daemon Lover” outside the scholarly tendency of viewing the protagonist as only a tragic victim.
However, before I can argue that Jackson employs the demon lover trope to expose the
seemingly impossible ideological constraints placed on women’s experience in the Cold War
143
era—constraints that are expressed through the unsympathetic communal gaze she experiences
when she leaves her apartment to search for Harris—I must first make a space for such a reading
and try to present the story in all of its wonderful ambiguity.
The narrative begins when the protagonist wakes up in her modest one-bedroom
apartment on the day she is to be married to James Harris, an aspiring writer who is to pick her
up at ten o’clock in the morning to take her to the courthouse. In the opening line of the story, the
speaker suggests that perhaps the protagonist is especially anxious because she had sex with
Harris before he left her last night:
She had not slept well; from one-thirty, when Jamie left and she went lingeringly to bed,
until seven, when she at last allowed herself to get up and make coffee, she had slept
fitfully, stirring awake to open her eyes and look into the half-darkness, remembering
over and over, slipping into a feverish dream. (9)

Rather than clarify what the protagonist keeps remembering, the narrator continues in a matter-
of-fact tone: “She spent an hour over her coffee—they were to have a real breakfast on the
way—and unless she wanted to dress early, she had nothing to do” (9). The protagonist decides
to write her sister a letter—“Dearest Anne, by the time you get this I will be married. Doesn’t it
sound funny? I can hardly believe it myself, but when I tell you how it happened, you’ll see it’s
even stranger than that. . . . ” (9)—and then, when she cannot think of what to say next, she tears
it up.
What happened the previous night before Harris said goodbye? Why are the
circumstances of her engagement so strange that she stops mid-sentence in a letter to her sister?
These questions and many more remain unanswered because, even when the narration is not
focalizing through the protagonist, the narrator does not report—or does not have access to—
what the unnamed protagonist wishes to suppress from her consciousness, which is perfectly
exemplified in the following passage. The first line is narrated monologue from the viewpoint of
144
the protagonist, who is drinking her coffee and surveying her apartment, but even after it shifts
into psycho-narration and then into what seems to be external, authorial narration, the only thing
that is certain is that something did indeed happen the previous night:
They planned to come back here tonight and everything must be correct. With sudden
horror she realized that she forgotten to put clean sheets on the bed; the laundry was
freshly back and she took clean sheets and pillow cases from the top shelf of the closet
and stripped the bed, working quickly to avoid thinking consciously of why she was
changing the sheets. The bed was a studio bed, with a cover to make it look like a couch,
and when it was finished no one would have known she had just put clean sheets on it.
(10)
8

When the protagonist sees that it’s after nine o’clock, she begins to get ready. And as she
hesitates before the closet door contemplating which of her two dresses is the least
unfavorable—the blue dress (familiar but unexciting) or the print dress (pretty but girlish and
possibly out-of-season)—the extended psycho-narration makes the reader privy to the dramatic
fluctuations in her emotional state through the back and forth of her internal dialogue. Leaning
toward the print dress, the protagonist asserts a confidence, “This is my wedding day, I can dress
as I please,” but after trying it on, she thinks with revulsion, “It’s as though I was trying to make
myself look prettier than I am, just for him; he’ll think I want to look younger because he’s
marrying me,” and she takes the dress off so quickly she rips a seam under the arm. With the
blue dress on, she switches tones once again: “It isn’t what you’re wearing that matters, she told
herself firmly, and turned in dismay to the closet to see if there might be anything else” (11).
When she starts to put on makeup, we witness a similar shift:
her makeup was another delicate balance between looking as well as possible, and
deceiving as little. She could not try to disguise the sallowness of her skin, or the lines
around her eyes, today, when it might look as though she were only doing it for her
wedding, and yet she could not bear the thought of Jamie’s bringing to marriage anyone
who looked haggard and lined. You’re thirty-four years old after all, she told herself
cruelly in the bathroom. Thirty, it said on the license. (11–12)

8
I say this only seems to be the narrator speaking because it may be the protagonist, in which case the final line
divulges a self-awareness that looks can be deceiving, sexual experience can be covered up, and most importantly,
narratives might be revised.
145

The impersonal tone of the final line seems to suggest that it is the narrator who speaks, but once
again undecidedly so. If it is the protagonist, then these opening passages divulge a self-
awareness that has largely gone unnoted.
At two minutes to ten, the protagonist is ready despite being unsatisfied with her clothes,
her face, her apartment (12). She heats the coffee and sits down by the window—“Can’t do
anything more now . . . no sense trying to improve anything at the last minute” (12)—and
reconciled, she begins to think of Jamie but could not see his face clearly or hear his voice, and
tries to reassure herself: “It’s always that way with someone you love” (12). What is striking
about this passage is that her anxiety is similar to that of a writer who is debating whether or not
to make last-minute revisions on a text and perhaps provide a clearer vision of the romantic hero.
And as she lets her mind slip “past today and tomorrow, into the farther future,” it seems as
though her attachment to Jamie and their “golden house-in-the-country future” where she will no
longer have to live in the city and hold a job, and with time and practice, will learn to be an ideal
housewife (12), is an attempt to rewrite past decisions and materialize her own alternate self.
By ten-thirty, she calls information to make sure she has the correct time, and at the
sound of the metallic voice on the other end of the line, she half-consciously “set her clock back
a minute; she was remembering her own voice saying last night, in the doorway: ‘Ten o’clock
then. I’ll be ready. Is it really true?’ And Jamie laughing down the hallway” (12). By eleven, she
has sewn up the rip in her print dress, put it back on, and is sitting by the window, drinking
another cup of coffee (12–13). All of this is intensified against the backdrop of her apartment,
which is in a state of complete suspension waiting for her new life with Jamie to begin—the
146
sheets are changed, the towels are clean, and the refrigerator is stocked.
9
By eleven-thirty, she is
so dizzy and weak that she decides to go down to the drugstore for some food and leaves a note
for Jamie on her door. Once there, however, she realizes she only wants more coffee, which she
leaves half-finished “because she suddenly realized that Jamie was probably upstairs waiting and
impatient, anxious to get started”—a description that matches her own feelings. But upstairs, she
finds “her note unread on the door,” and her apartment in the exact state she had left it. She sits
back down on the chair by the window “until she realized that she had been asleep and it was
twenty minutes to one,” and looking around the room of “waiting and readiness, everything clean
and untouched since ten o’clock,” the protagonist is frightened and feels an urgent need to hurry
and rushes out of the apartment without leaving a note (14).
She takes a taxi to Jamie’s address and when she sees no buzzer for Harris, she calls on
the superintendent couple and her inquiry is met with a jeering cynicism: “‘You got the wrong
house, lady,’ he said, and added in a lower voice, ‘or the wrong guy,’ and he and the woman
laughed” (18). As the superintendent closes the door, the protagonist says “to the thin lighted
crack still showing, ‘But he does live here; I know it,’” and, for a moment, it seems that the wife
might be more empathetic but she only provides the cold comfort of the “been there, done that”
variety: “‘Look,’ the woman said, opening the door again a little, ‘it happens all the time.’” The
protagonist understands the woman’s thinly veiled meaning and insists, in a dignified voice
“with thirty-four years of accumulated pride. ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand’” (15). The
superintendent’s wife redirects the protagonist to the Roysters in apartment 3B, who may have
sublet their apartment to Harris while they were upstate for the past month.

9
When she realizes she is hungry, she thinks: “There was nothing to eat in the apartment except the food she
had carefully stocked up for their life beginning together: the unopened package of bacon, the dozen eggs in their
box, the unopened bread and the unopened butter; they were for breakfast tomorrow” (13).
147
Mrs. Royster, who wears a housecoat and last night’s makeup (16), invites the
protagonist inside, where she sees Mr. Royster sitting there, “for a minute resembling Jamie”
(17). This moment of confusion is exaggerated by the loud music in the background and the fact
that the appropriately named couple take little notice of the protagonist as they bicker over who
was responsible for inviting the houseguest, who neither of them seem to know the vaguest thing
about. As Mrs. Royster explains between bites of bread and peanut butter, whoever he was, he
“must’ve left this morning, before we got back. No sign of him anywhere” (18). The protagonist
has already turned toward the door by the time Mrs. Royster seems to understand that she might
be in trouble, and she is halfway down the first flight of stairs when the woman in 3B opens the
door again and shouts, “If I see him I’ll tell him you were looking for him” (19).
Unable to go home “with Jamie somewhere between here and there,” the protagonist
stands outside the building so long that “a woman, leaning out of a window across the way,
turned and called to someone inside to come and see” (18). On an impulse, the protagonist
decides to ask after Harris at the delicatessen next-door; she asks the man at the counter if he
happened to notice a tall man who usually wears a blue suit around ten o’clock and he rudely
reminds her that they live in a city full of men that meet this very description. As she leaves, she
thinks, “It’s because I’m not buying anything,” which could be said of all the men she asks (19).
Outside, as she walked to the corner, she thinks:
he must have come this way, it’s the only way he’d go to get to my house, it’s the only
way for him to walk. She tried to think of Jamie: where would he have crossed the street?
What sort of person was he actually—would he cross in front of his own apartment
house, at random in the middle of the block, at the corner? (20)

The protagonist does not reflect that perhaps these are strange questions to be asking about one’s
fiancé on the day of the wedding, and the narrator refrains from commenting. But once again, the
protagonist also sounds like a writer contemplating one of her characters.
148
When she approaches the newsstand, she better anticipates the newsdealer’s response and
immediately explains that Harris is a writer and might have bought some magazines. Initially, the
man seems confused by the questions but then he abruptly remembers a man who may have been
her gentleman friend who came by earlier in the morning on his way uptown (20–21). Although
she notices that the newsdealer is playing to an audience when he directs his smile to a customer
standing in back of her (20), she does not question the validity of his statement, even after she
hears laughter as she continues across the street; but, then again, uptown puts Jamie in the
direction of her own apartment. As she makes her way north, following the route she imagines
Jamie must have taken to her house, she sees a flower shop and thinks, “This is my wedding day
after all, he might have gotten flowers to bring me” (21). After much prodding, the florist recalls
that a man fitting her description had stopped by earlier to buy chrysanthemums, and although
she seems disappointed at the hypothetical Jamie’s choice of flowers for such an occasion, she
incorporates this detail into her story as well, even despite the florist’s suddenly nasty tone when
she leaves the shop without having purchased anything herself.
Continuing on with her journey, she reflects “Everyone thinks it’s so funny: and she
pulled her coat tighter around her, so that only the ruffle around the bottom of the print dress was
showing” (23). She sees a policeman and thinks, “Why don’t I go to the police—you go to the
police for a missing person,” but then reminds herself she would feel like such a fool (23). In
fact, she has a quick vision of standing in a police station and rehearses the scene in her head; she
imagines what she would say—“we were going to be married today, but he didn’t come”—and
how the three or four policemen would be looking at her, smiling at one another (23). She also
thinks of everything she could not say to them:
Yes, it looks silly, doesn’t it, me all dressed up and trying to find the young man who
promised to marry me, but what about all of it you don’t know? I have more than this,
more than you can see: talent, perhaps, and humor of a sort, and I’m a lady and I have
149
pride and affection and delicacy and a certain clear view of life that might make a man
satisfied and productive and happy; there’s more than you think when you look at me.
(21)

The protagonist asserts a version of femininity that is more than skin-deep. But, as she herself
acknowledges, her value cannot be ascertained by looking and cannot be confirmed by anyone
besides herself. Here, the narrative underlines the discrepancy between the social reality and the
prevailing patriarchal ideology, which, even in the city, marginalizes women who have failed to
conform to its version of femininity and domesticity by their thirties.
10
In contrast to traditional
Gothic fantasy, in which “the quest for identity becomes a self-contradictory fear of identity, a
fear of the mutilated masculine or feminine half selves and a desire to affirm one or the other of
these unitary archetypes” (Day 78), Jackson’s protagonist does not fear her heterogeneous
identity as much as she fears failing to adjust her personal narrative to the dominant discourse
and James Harris had been a major factor in this quest.
Deciding against going to the police, the protagonist says “No, no” aloud as she hurries
onward and someone passing stops and looks at her (23), though she does not appear to notice.
At the next corner, she sees a shoeshine stand and before she can finish her description of Harris,
the old man confirms the sighting, adding “Got a shine, had his flowers, all dressed up, in an
awful hurry. You got a girl I thought” (24). She tips the man and hurries up the three blocks to
her place: “For the first time she was really sure he would be waiting for her . . . . From the
corner she could not see her own windows, could not see Jamie looking out, waiting for her, and

10
In The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1975, Pamela Robertson
Wojcik discusses the single girl’s experience in the city: “The bohemian apartment produces a temporary modernity,
allowing the single girl to experience the rupture of leaving home without effecting a permanent break. In the
apartment, she inhabits a new temporality of contingency and encounter. Her apartment enables play with identities
and roles, especially sexual experimentation. To be sure, she pays significant rent for her temporary accommodation
in modernity. . . If she lingers too long and the apartment becomes a permanent dwelling, rather than an intermediate
base of operations, she risks stagnation and death” (179).
150
going down the block she was almost running to get to him” (25). She is already saying, “Jamie,
I’m here, I was so worried,” before she unlocks the door, but when she opens it:
Her own apartment was waiting for her, silent, barren, afternoon shadows lengthening
from the window. For a minute she saw only the empty coffee cup, thought, He has been
here waiting, before she recognized it as her own, left from the morning. She looked all
over the room, into the closet, into the bathroom. (25)

She leaves once again and checks with the man at the drugstore downstairs, and then returns to
the shoeshine stand. The old man repeats what he knows, this time adding that he saw the young
man with the flowers go into a house somewhere in the middle of the next block. With hardly a
goodbye, she rushes off in that direction, “searching the houses from the outside to see if Jamie
looked from a window, listening to hear his laughter somewhere inside” (26). She approaches a
woman standing outside who is rocking a baby in a carriage, and asks after Harris—the question
is fluent by now (26)—when an adolescent older boy, possibly the woman’s son, stops to listen.
The woman responds tiredly—“Listen . . . the kid has his bath at ten. Would I see strange men
walking around? I ask you”—but the boy is eager to be of assistance, claiming that he followed
the man inside the apartment house next door and the man said “This is a big day for me, kid”
and gave him a quarter (26). The protagonist gives the boy a dollar and he tells her to go way to
the top, and, for the third time the boy asks “You gonna divorce him?”—the final time he calls
her “missus”—and then careens down the street, howling, “‘She’s got something on the poor
guy,’ and the woman rocking the baby laughed” (27).
Instead of the golden house in the country (12), the protagonist’s pieced-together
narrative has brought her to the gothic house in the city: “the street door of the apartment house
is unlocked; there were no bells in the vestibule, and no lists of names. The stairs were narrow
and dirty; there were two doors on the top floor” (27). She sees the crumpled florist’s paper and a
151
knotted paper ribbon on the floor outside the door in the front, and it is “like a clue, like the final
clue in the paper chase” (27). This is how her paper chase ends:
She knocked, and thought she heard voices inside, and she thought, suddenly, with terror,
What shall I say if Jamie is there, if he comes to the door? The voices seemed suddenly
still. She knocked again and there was silence, except for something that might have been
laughter far away. He could have seen me from the window, she thought, it’s the front
apartment and that little boy made a dreadful noise. She waited, and knocked again, but
there was silence.
Finally she went to the other door on the floor, and knocked. The door swung open
beneath her hand and she saw the empty attic room, bare lath on the walls, floorboards
un-painted. She stepped just inside, looking around; the room was filled with bags of
plaster, piles of old newspapers, a broken trunk. There was a noise which she suddenly
realized as a rat, and then she saw it, sitting very close to her, near the wall, its evil face
alert, bright eyes watching her. She stumbled in her haste to be out with the door closed,
and the skirt of the print dress caught and tore.
She knew there was someone inside the other apartment, because she was sure she
could hear low voices and sometimes laughter. She came back many times, every day for
the first week. She came on her way to work, in the mornings, in the evening, on her way
to dinner alone, but no matter how often or how firmly she knocked, no one ever came to
the door. (27–28)

How are we to read this ending? Does the conclusion signal the end of the protagonist’s
“circulation in this literal and textual economy” (38), as Hattenhauer suggests?
11
Does Jackson
use the demon lover trope “to figure a jouissance excluded by the Symbolic order, which

11
Hattenhauer views the protagonist of “The Daemon Lover” as a schizoid character and remarks that her
internal splitting begins when she forgets to change the sheets and argues: “it is not just the sexual association to the
sheets she represses but also the textual. The man she imagines marrying is a writer. This delusion projects her own
denied textualizing, as does her giving him what could be a woman’s first name” (36). Although I agree with
Hattenhauer that the protagonist’s story develops “according to the reader response of the characters to whom she
tells her story” (37), I believe he ultimately interprets the protagonist as overly passive and interpellated.
152
because of its repression, returns with a destructive force,” as Wyatt Bonikowski argues?
12
Is
Hall correct to assert that the protagonist’s pride and sense of self are as delicate a fabric as the
fiancée’s print dress (A Study 12–14)? Admittedly, a ripped seam is much easier to repair than a
tear in the fabric of identity, but I do think it is important to consider that the protagonist has
already stitched her dress up once today. Therefore, without wishing to deny the serious
implications of the conclusion, I would like to examine ways in which the story’s
(inter)textuality destabilizes the narrative closure that critics tend to take for granted.
In demonology books, a demon lover is a witch, or the female paramour of the devil
(Stephens 25), a definition that seems particularly meaningful when we consider the painful
ridicule the protagonist experiences when she searches her neighborhood looking for Harris.
13

But though this demon lover is relevant to both the story and The Lottery in general, the more
significant demon lover is James Harris, the seductive revenant and cloven-footed guide to hell
who was popularized in the seventeenth-century ballad, “James Harris, (The Daemon Lover),”
also known as “A Warning for married women” and “The House Carpenter,” to name a few. In
the ballad, Harris returns home from sea after being absent for seven years, presumed dead, to

12
In a recent article “‘Only one antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of
Shirley Jackson” (2013), Wyatt Bonikowski addresses the lack of critical attention focused specifically on the
demon lover trope, which he exhibits can be found throughout her work. Similar to Hattenhauer, Bonikowski reads
Jackson’s work through a Lacanian lens, but he focuses specifically on Lacan’s concept of the Thing, which as I
discussed in the first section, Lacan derives from Freud’s “neighbor complex.” The demon lover, he suggests, “is for
the feminine subject what the Lady of courtly love is for the masculine subject—that is, a representation of the
Thing and of the impingement of the Real on the subject” (71). Although Lacanian critics often underline a
subversive or creative potential in femininity, Bonikowski explains that such a potential would seem to be absent in
Jackson’s demon lover tales, which “portray women not as ‘not-all’ in the Symbolic but rather ‘not at all’ within it,
driven out of their homes and stripped of their identities. Rather than discovering a resistant potential in their savoir
of jouissance, which might provide an alternative to the restrictive domesticity of their lives, Jackson’s characters
discover only the destructive side of jouissance, their subjection to the Thing” (71). Of the many works that
Bonikowski identifies as demon lover tales, only Hangsaman attempts to chart a path for feminine jouissance
because Natalie’s writing “provides her with a kind of magic or witchcraft, the creative potential to express what
cannot be fully contained by the signifier,” but, he adds, Natalie’s future as a “viable feminine subject is by no
means unambiguous” (69–70). Bonikowski makes a strong argument in which he considers both the historical
context of the story and Jackson’s intertextual references; however, I believe he overlooks the writerly potential of
the protagonist in the “The Daemon Lover”—or how the narrative engages with textuality more generally.
13
For more on the association of witches as demon lovers, see Walter Stephens’s Demon Lovers: Witchcraft,
Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (2002), which Wyatt Bonikowski also refers to in “Only One Antagonist.”
153
take revenge on Jane Reynolds for breaking their marriage vows. Harris uses his apparent wealth
to persuade Reynolds to leave her carpenter husband and children and embark on a journey with
him, but after only a short while at sea, the revenant reveals his true purpose and the ballad ends
when he “brake that gallant ship in twain / And sank her in the sea” (qtd. in Jackson 239).
14
The
ballad is not simply a cautionary tale that reinforces traditional patriarchal society and family
structure (Atkinson 599), but, as Joanna Brooks explains in Why We Left: Untold Stories and
Songs of America’s First Immigrants (2013), it is also an attempt to express the feeling of
abandonment that attended colonial migration:
“The House Carpenter” ballad uses a traditional host narrative of infidelity to archive
feelings of betrayal, loss, dislocation, and desolation associated with colonization. The
ballad reveals that common English men and women understood the lures of colonization
to be as false as a lover’s promises and the event of leaving home for America to be as
devastating as a shipwreck. . . . Indeed, the ballad narrative that ascribed familial disaster
to one woman’s choice to leave home and cross the ocean masked much larger economic
and social forces at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had rendered
families and communities more vulnerable to dissolution. (147)

Brooks explains that to understand the root causes of these feelings, “we must move
through the catachrestic reversals of the narrative into the more prosaic histories it strives, in its
own twisted and ultimately catastrophic way, to make sense of” (147), and she reveals that the
prosaic histories tell of the dissolution and dislocation of the laboring-class families in the shift
from traditional patronage- and kinship-networked family structures to the patriarchal family
unit, which accompanied the economic modernization of England (147–148). Brooks continues:
The same forces that led to the growth of English colonial ambitions and enterprises
dramatically uprooted and destabilized families. And yet, in the popular literature of the
time, it is the poor moral choices of individuals and not these tectonic socioeconomic

14
“James Harris, (The Daemon Lover)” first began appearing in print in the mid-seventeenth century (Atkinson
592). While there are many versions of it, this is a summary of Child Ballad 243, which is the version Jackson
excerpts in the epilogue. Although the vow between Harris and Reynolds would not hold much weight today, “A
seventeenth-century English audience would have understood this solemn vow as equivalent to marriage itself and
as a condition for legitimate sexual intimacy between Harris and Reynolds” (Brooks 139). For an introduction to the
ballad, see Atkinson’s “Marriage and Retribution in ‘James Harris (The Daemon Lover)’” (1989). And, for a brief
overview of the aesthetic changes the ballad underwent in its passage to America, see Hyman’s “The Child Ballad in
America: Some Aesthetic Criteria” (1957).
154
shifts that are blamed for the abandonment of families. . . . In the eyes of the governing
classes, the laboring-class English men, women, and children who went as indentured
servants to North America were individuals who had “forsaken” and “abandoned” their
homes, families, employers, England, even morality itself. No one of this class seemed to
entertain the idea that somewhere along the way in its ambition for mercantile power
England itself had abandoned its own laboring people. (152)

By placing “James Harris, (The Daemon Lover)” within the context of modernization and
colonization, and alongside popular literature of the time, Brooks contributes an insightful and
indispensable analysis of the ballad. Moreover, her reading suggests a possible contiguity
between the early-modern historical context of the original ballad, and the modern context of
Jackson’s appropriation of the demon lover trope.
Jackson’s story about an unmarried, thirty-four year old woman who works in postwar
New York City represents a very specific time, place, and an emerging figure in American
culture.
15
Although we never learn what, exactly, the protagonist does for a living, that a single
woman can afford to live alone in the city suggests that she has done moderately well for herself.
In many ways, then, “The Daemon Lover” should be compared to the popular narrative of the
young career girl, which is perfectly epitomized by Life Magazine’s 1948 “The Private Life of
Gwyned Filling,” a twelve-page photo-essay about a twenty-three-year-old Missouri native who
is a copywriter at Newell-Emmett Co., a large advertising agency in New York City.
Out of more than a thousand candidates (Fitzgerald 1), Filling was selected as the
summation of “The hopes and fears of countless young career girls . . . in her struggle to succeed
in New York” (103). While Filling’s story undoubtedly reflected the underrepresented
experience of some women trying to establish a career in a field dominated by men—and
certainly inspired many more—she is a white, middle-class, college-educated, and attractive

15
The geographical setting is never stated outright but it is almost certainly set in New York City, and
Greenwich Village specifically. Besides the fact that almost all of the city stories in The Lottery are explicitly set in
New York City (“Trial by Combat,” “The Villager,” “My Life with R.H. Macy,” “Elizabeth,” “Pillar of Salt,” and
“The Tooth”), there are also several of the country stories that feature a protagonist recently relocated from the city,
and of those, New York City is named in “Flower Garden” and “Men With their Big Shoes.”
155
young woman who, despite her ambition, is already quite prepared to subordinate her career,
which she insists she wants to do for another five years (110), to the traditional marriage plot.
The magazine features several pictures of her with two coworker-beaus, Carl Nichols and
Charles Straus, and within six months of publication, she will quit her job to marry Straus,
prompting Life to announce in a follow-up article in late November: “Gwyned Filling’s story has
a happy ending” (“Career Girl Gets Married” 135).
16
To those women trying to create a viable
alternative to the dominant discourse of domesticity—and one that does not have an expiration
date—Filling’s minor celebrity status as first a career girl, and then a happily married wife, may
have done more harm than good.
What if Life had selected a young woman who was either unwilling to jeopardize her
career for marriage, or who was simply unlucky in love? Although postwar ideology may not
have been as averse to nondomestic achievement as Betty Friedan argues in The Feminine
Mystique (1963), it nevertheless privileged the domestic ideal and marked a retreat to prewar
assumptions about gender roles (Meyerowitz 250–51). By making her protagonist over a decade
older than Filling, Jackson imagines the career girl narrative without the happy ending, and her
version is wrought with anxiety and the fear of figural displacement, or self-alienation. But
Jackson also critiques the happy ending; she peppers the protagonist’s journey with realistic
portraits of married life and motherhood, and regardless of whether or not the protagonist
recognizes them as the inverse of the golden future she envisions (Bokinowski 73), the reader
does.

16
The May photo-essay emphasizes the sacrifices Filling has made and the resultant fear that she may be
putting her chance to get married in jeopardy by focusing on her career (103). In the November article, the caption
for the wedding photo reads: “Bride and groom, looking far happier than they did when she was intent on her
career” (135). It also includes photos of them on their cruise and a picture of them before their wedding, “Making
plans for their new home—an apartment in Greenwich Village—Gwyned and Charlie sketch the furniture
arrangement” (136).
156
In “The Daemon Lover,” Jackson demonstrates that the problem with the popular career
girl story is a story problem; it is presented as a question in need of a solution—and one that
must be solved before the clock runs out and the girl becomes a woman—and because of this, it
carries an unmistakably cautionary message. In other words, the popular career girl narrative is
univocally treated as a very temporary sidebar to domestic discourse and is always foreshadowed
by a gothic tale of dislocation and abandonment. By imagining this gothic tale as an uncanny
return of a seventeenth-century ballad about a woman’s violent destruction, Jackson reveals the
reactionary undertone of popular representations of the young career girl—an undertone that
might be characterized as a warning for unmarried women—and ultimately suggests that it is
high time for a radical revision of the prevailing discourse.
Such a reading of “The Daemon Lover” does not preclude the possibility that the
protagonist is herself engaged in process of revision, whether her attachment to Jamie stems
from the desire to attain the ideal family and the house in the suburbs, from the pressure to adapt
her career narrative to the domestic discourse, or from the need to assign meaning to her current
situation by looking to the past, or simply to escape the isolation of her current situation by
imagining an alternative present. The multiple interpretations are reinforced if we consider the
connection that “The Daemon Lover” has to Vernon Lee’s fantastic story, “Oke of Okehurst; or,
The Phantom Lover” (1886), and, in particular, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”
157
(1945).
17
However, in comparison to the conclusively violent conclusions of “The Phantom
Lover” and “The Demon Lover,” Jackson’s is more open-ended. Although the unnamed
protagonist is dispossessed of home and identity, her displacement is, to at least a small extent,
figuratively counterbalanced by her writerly potential. Her recurring return to the threshold of the
locked apartment, which represents her now-impossible future with Harris, is also a recurring
return to the empty attic, which is not actually empty at all. It is filled with bags of plaster, piles
of old newspapers, and a broken trunk—discarded material that might be used to start anew.
Therefore, to conclude my own paper chase, I will offer one final clue from an early scene in
“The Daemon Lover”: “With the print dress on, she was sitting by the window drinking another
cup of coffee. I could have taken more time over my dressing, after all, she thought; but by now

17
In “Oke of Okehurst,” Mrs. Alice Oke identifies so strongly with Okehurst manor’s original Alice Oke of
1626, that she appears to be in love with her ancestor’s murdered lover, a gallant young poet named Christopher
Lovelock. Athena Vretto’s “‘In the clothes of dead people’: Vernon Lee and Ancestral Memory” (2013), reads the
story against the backdrop of Victorian psychology and physical research and argues that “Lee constructs the past as
‘a free place for our imagination’” to probe “unexplored layers of ancestral consciousness . . . so that they may
simultaneously license and contain the longings of our ghostly, hidden selves” (210). But I also view Alice’s belief
in the story that Alice and Nicholas Oke of 1626 murdered Lovelock allows her to assign meaning (causality) to her
unhappy marriage, and regardless of whether or not she ever wanted children, what must have been a traumatic
experience of losing a child and nearly her own life eighteen years prior (109). Alice explains to the first-person
narrator that right before Nicholas Oke died he “made a prophecy that when the head of his house and master of
Okehurst should marry another Alice Oke, descended from himself and his wife, there should be an end of the Okes
of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have no children, and I don’t suppose we shall ever have any.
I, at least, have never wished for them” (82). And the prophecy is fulfilled at the end of the story when Alice’s
husband William, who has become increasingly paranoid and jealous of Lovelock’s ghost, believes he sees
Lovelock with his wife in the yellow drawing room and bursts in on them with a gun, only to shoot his wife dead
(132–34).
Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” is a World War II gothic short story, loosely based on the British ballad and
seemingly inspired by Henry James “The Jolly Corner” (1908). The narrative follows Kathleen Drover on a visit to
her abandoned London home—she, like many inhabitants of her block, has relocated to the country due to damage
from the war—where she finds a letter from K., her ex-fiancé who went missing, presumed dead, twenty-five years
earlier during World War I, and who has returned to make good on his promise. Kathleen tries to escape from K.’s
immanent arrival and she hails a taxi outside her apartment only to discover K. is the driver, and the story ends with
Kathleen screaming and beating her hands “on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off
with her into the hinterland of deserted streets” (666). Similar to Jackson’s James Harris, Bowen’s demon lover is a
shadowy figure; he is indeterminately a living person, a vengeful revenant, or an uncanny return of an alternative
life that Kathleen (or “K.”) has repressed. Likewise, Bowen’s engagement with “James Harris, (The Daemon
Lover)” can be interpreted within its own specific historical context. The ways that Jackson’s tale interacts with, and
departs from, Bowen’s story are various and would require a separate study.
158
it was so late he might come any minute, and she did not dare try to repair anything without
starting all over” (13, emphasis added).
“Like Mother Used to Make”
“David recognized the tone; it was the one hostesses used when they didn’t know what else to
say to you, or when you had come too early or stayed too late. It was the tone he had expected to
use on Mr. Harris.”
—David

“Like Mother Used to Make” concerns the space of the threshold as well and tells the
story of David Turner, an effeminate young man who is defeated by his assertive next-door
neighbor and near acquaintance, Marcia. Similar to the conclusion of “The Daemon Lover” and
“Trial by Combat,” another story in the first section of The Lottery, Jackson uses the urban
architecture to represent a binary, and in this case, she doubles her characters across gender lines,
with David as the traditionally feminine self and Marcia as the traditionally masculine self. By
presenting this neighbor v. neighbor configuration, Jackson reveals that although the city is more
conducive to alternative lifestyles, the dominant culture nonetheless determines a very
problematic hierarchy of tolerable difference, whose influence is palpable and appears in the
form of James Harris—this time, in the flesh. However, Jackson also suggests that David is
partially responsible for his own exclusion because he has made a habit of gently elevating
himself in relation to Marcia, and, perhaps like his mother would, he deems Marcia’s
unconventional lifestyle outside the bounds of proper femininity.
18

The narrative follows David on a normal evening, as he walks home from the bus stop
and stops in a corner store for butter and rolls that he can hardly afford with his meager salary,
then into his small apartment that the scrupulous homemaker is proud to call his home. David is

18
This aspect of my reading is somewhat influenced by Alexis Shotwell’s article, “‘No proper feeling for her
house’: The Relational Formation of White Womanliness in Shirley Jackson’s Fiction” (2013), which I will also
refer to in my discussion of “Flower Garden.”
159
cooking dinner and has invited Marcia, who lives in the only other apartment on the third floor,
and we follow him as he uses her spare key to leave a note reminding her to come over. Each
apartment has the exact same layout but David finds Marcia’s apartment dirty and disagreeable,
and after walking across her paper-strewn floor to close a window that she left open all day, he
exits quickly. Marcia gave David a key because she is never home when the laundryman comes
or the workmen need to do repairs and fortunately for David, “Marcia had never suggested
having a key to David’s apartment, and he had never offered her one. For, it pleased him to have
only one key to his home, and that safely in his own pocket; it had a pleasant feeling to him,
solid and small, the only way into his warm fine home” (31).
David seems to enjoy his place even more by comparing his housekeeping skills to
Marcia’s, particularly because he can kindly reprimand Marcia, as he does later during dinner,
with comments such as “You ought to keep your home neater . . . . You ought to get curtains at
least, and keep your windows shut” (34). Likewise, although David is a generous neighbor and
host, who regularly cooks dinner for the both of them, he seems to want Marcia around so he can
vicariously experience his hard-earned material possessions, including his new silverware—“He
liked the feel of the fork in his hand, even the sight of the fork moving up to Marcia’s mouth”
(34)—and relish in her admiration for his superior cooking and decorating abilities. In return for
his agreeability with Marcia’s habitual lateness and poor manners, David receives unadulterated
appreciation; after complimenting the wonderful food, Marcia qualifies her statement: “I mean
everything . . . furniture, and nice place you have here, and dinner, and everything,” and then
laments her own lack of refinement with “Someone should teach me, I guess” (34). For the
favors, the free food, and pleasant surroundings, Marcia happily indulges him, and after David
160
apologizes for his sour cherry pie because he ran out of sugar, she proclaims “It’s perfect . . . . I
always loved a cherry pie really sour. This isn’t sour enough, even” (25).
When Marcia hears her doorbell ring from David’s apartment, she presses his buzzer
because she thinks it might be the landlord looking for her late rent check, or so she says.
Instead, a tall man appears in the doorway and Marcia rises to greet him and then introduces
“Davie”—the diminutive nickname Marcia uses—to Mr. Harris, her coworker. While it is
unclear if Marcia had expected Mr. Harris or if she improvises upon his arrival, from the start,
she acts in a way that gives Mr. Harris the impression that this is her apartment. When she offers
Mr. Harris a piece of homemade pie, to which he replies “I’ve forgotten what homemade pie
looks like,” Marcia accepts Mr. Harris’s praise of the perfectly sour pie. And with a devious
smile, Marcia includes David in his own exclusion and replies, “I haven’t made but two, three
pies before” (36). Unable to expose Marcia and thus assert his power of hospitality and
sovereignty as host, David becomes a guest in his own home (Derrida, Of Hospitality 53–55).
Although David has reason to feel upset for being used, his feeling of disgust is
somewhat inappropriate for the situation, especially because it arises before Marcia invites Mr.
Harris to sit with her in the living room and leaves David with the dirty dishes. While the three of
them are still sitting at the dinner table, “David’s desire to be rid of Mr. Harris had slid
unperceptively into an urgency to be rid of them both; his clean house, his nice silver, were not
meant as vehicles for the kind of fatuous banter Marcia and Mr. Harris were playing at together”
(37). David’s repulsion arises from a repressed homosexual desire for Harris, a desire he tries to
deny when he fastidiously washes the cups so that “Mr. Harris’ cup was unrecognizable; you
could not tell, from the clean rows of cups, which one he had used or which one had been stained
with Marcia’s lipstick or which one had held David’s coffee” (38).
161
When David finishes cleaning up and moves to the living room where Marcia and James
Harris are “talking earnestly,” Marcia addresses David with a tone he recognized: “it was the one
hostesses used when they didn’t know what else to say to you, or when you had come too early
or stayed too late. It was the tone he had expected to use on Mr. Harris” (38).
19
Still unable to
voice a word of protest, David takes Marcia’s cue and bids them a goodnight, and after accepting
Harris’s hand with a limp shake, he exits (39). And thus, just like her namesake Mars, the
mythological god of war, Marcia gains possession of David’s home while he is exiled to her
alien apartment—or, to make Jackson’s subtle wordplay painfully explicit, I might say that
David is alienated to the “Martian” apartment.
In “Like Mother Used to Make,” James Harris again disrupts the fragile balance of this
codependent neighbor relationship. While both David and Marcia occupy a liminal space with
their nontraditional gender identities, the story seems to imply that only Marcia can be initiated
into the greater heteronormative community, which she does by appropriating David’s feminine
qualities and communing with Harris—a decision that not only marks David’s literal exclusion,
but might just as easily lead to Marcia’s own self-estrangement. But Jackson also seems to
suggest that David is already alienated from himself because he sublimates his desire into the
elsewhere of his material possessions, and in doing so, reinforces the gender norms that
marginalize both him and Marcia in the first place.
Alone in Marcia’s apartment, David wearily “leaned over and picked up a paper from the
floor, and then he began to gather them up one by one” (40). Will he patiently turn Marcia’s
apartment into another comfortable prison of pretty things or will he perhaps try to choose an
alternative narrative?

19
By drawing a parallel to the moment in “The Intoxicated” when the unnamed protagonist sees the hostess in
“earnest conversation” with a tall man in a blue suit (8), Jackson not only underlines the seductive charm of the
demon lover, but she also casts the partygoer and David in a similar light.
162

“Flower Garden”
“People treat you as you treat them”
–Mrs. Winning

The majority of the short stories in The Lottery have a very short timespan—somewhere
between the time it takes to converse over a cup of coffee to the length of time it takes a
tentatively stable individual to experience potentially crushing self-doubt or social exclusion,
which, in Jackson’s fictional world, often happens in less than a day. In contrast, “Flower
Garden” has a narrative that spans several months and the story’s markedly slower pace allows
Jackson to offer a far more distilled neighbor plot with a protagonist who occupies the space of
the threshold for an extended period of time.
“Flower Garden” also stands out because, as I mentioned in the introductory pages to this
section, Jackson puts racial discrimination front and center of this narrative, and yet, as Alexis
Shotwell argues in “‘No proper feeling for her house’: The Relational Formation of White
Womanliness in Shirley Jackson’s Fiction” (2013), black subjectivity is virtually absent from
this story because Jackson is interested in revealing how “gender is a relational enactment,
suturing together material realities through racialized social interactions” (119).
20
To put it
another way: like Harriet Merriam, Mrs. Winning is pressured to make a choice between her

20
Jackson also addresses racial discrimination in “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” first published in 1943, and
included in The Lottery. In this story, young Johnny Wilson surprises his mother when he invites his friend Boyd, a
small black boy, over for lunch. Over the course of the meal, it becomes increasingly clear Mrs. Wilson’s interest in
Boyd is steeped in racism; she makes several incorrect suppositions about Boyd’s living situation—for instance,
Johnny tells her that Boyd’s father works in a factory and she assumes this means he does manual labor when, in
fact, Boyd’s father is the foreman—and upon hearing that Boyd’s sister is going to be a teacher, “Mrs. Wilson
restrained an impulse to pat Boyd on the head” (87). When Mrs. Wilson offers to send Boyd home with a big bundle
of secondhand clothes for his mother to fix up for him, Boyd politely declines—“But I have plenty of clothes, thank
you” (88)—to which Mrs. Wilson righteously remarks: “There are many little boys like you, Boyd, who would be
very grateful for the clothes someone was kind enough to give them” (89). Even after Boyd apologizes for making
Mrs. Wilson mad, she does not relent and instead intensifies Boyd’s guilt when she explains: “Don’t think I’m
angry, Boyd, I’m just disappointed in you, that’s all” (89). The story ends as a worried Boyd hesitates at the kitchen
door between Mrs. Wilson and Johnny, who is holding it open.
163
family and the community, on the one hand, and a different woman like Mrs. MacLane, on the
other. However, it is not Mrs. MacLane’s difference that is disconcerting to the town, but rather,
her association with Mr. Jones, who is deemed intolerably different.
The story is focalized through Mrs. Helen Winning, who has lived in her husband’s
family manor for nearly eleven years and has spent so much time with her mother-in-law that the
two “had grown to look a good deal alike, as women will who live intimately together, and work
in the same kitchen and get things done around the house in the same manner” (103). Although
the Winnings might seem straight out of a Norman Rockwell illustration—sometimes, with her
mother-in-law beside her and her baby daughter in a high-chair close by, Mrs. Winning thinks
“they must resemble some stylized block print for a New England wallpaper”—she quietly
resents her marriage into the oldest family in her native hometown. Just as the younger Mrs.
Winning has learned to walk in the footsteps of the older Mrs. Winning, who she thinks “would
never relinquish the position of authority in her own house until she was too old to move before
anyone else,” her two children have learned to play “in the special baby corner, where uncounted
Winning children had played with almost identical toys from the same heavy wooden box”
(103).
On this particular morning in the late winter, as the two Mrs. Winnings are cleaning up
after breakfast, young Mrs. Winning sees the little cottage just down the hill in the distance and
says longingly, “If only someone would move in before spring” (101). For almost two months,
since she heard the cottage was sold, Mrs. Winning has awaited the arrival of the new tenants
because, as the narrator explains,
Young Mrs. Winning had wanted, long ago, to buy the cottage herself, for her husband to
make with his own hands into a home where they could live with their children, but now,
accustomed as she was to the big old house at the top of the hill . . . she had only a great
kindness left toward the little cottage, and a wistful anxiety to see some happy young
people living there. (104)
164

After the cottage is painted and a few repairs are done, the new neighbors finally move
in. And, as in so many of Jackson’s stories, Mrs. Winning first hears news about the “Nice-
looking lady” and her little boy from the grocer, Tom, while she is doing her shopping (106).
Tom’s use of the term “lady” does not go unnoticed by Mrs. Winning, who had not always been
a lady, and had once hoped to be the grocer’s wife:
Mrs. Winning had been born in the town and the grocer’s father had given her
jawbreakers and licorice in the grocery store while the present grocer was still in high
school. For a while, when she was twelve and the grocer’s son was twenty, Mrs. Winning
had secretly hoped that he would want to marry her. He was fleshy now, and middle-
aged, and although he still called her Helen and she still called him Tom, she belonged
now to the Winning family and had to speak critically to him, no matter how unwillingly,
if the meat were tough or the butter price too high. She knew that when he spoke of the
new neighbor as a “lady” he meant something different than if he had spoken of her as a
“woman” or a “person.” Mrs. Winning knew that he spoke of the two Mrs. Winnings to
his other customers as ladies. (106)
21

Mrs. Winning’s curiosity gets the better of her as she walks home, and under the guise of a
friendly neighbor, she knocks on the cottage door and, with just a glance thinks, “She’s younger
than I am . . . she’s about thirty. And pretty. For a clear minute Mrs. Winning saw why the grocer
had called her a lady” (107-08). When Mrs. MacLane invites her in, Mrs. Winning is quite taken
aback by the lovely home and finds herself “[h]elpless before so much that was magic to her”
(110).
Although young Mrs. Winning takes her mother-in-law’s sense of superiority at face
value, the narrator subtly indicates that the elder woman harbors her own insecurities, which
perhaps stem from a deep-rooted dissatisfaction similar to her daughter-in-law’s. For example,

21
The narrator’s commentary on how Helen must speak critically to the grocer if the price of butter is too high
now that she is a Winning is revealing of David Turner’s upbringing. When David is at the grocery store at the start
of “Like Mother Used to Make,” he questions the clerk when he is told that butter is eighty-nine cents and on the
way home he thinks, “I really ought not to trade there any more; you’d think they’d know me well enough to be
more courteous” (30). But Jackson also draws a connection between these two stories through the name David,
which is also the name of Mrs. MacLane’s overtly affectionate young son. And it seems that this choice was
deliberate; in earlier drafts of “Like Mother Used to Make,” David Turner was, interestingly, James (Jamie) Turner
(Hall, A Study 15).
165
when the young Mrs. Winning’s describes the perfect little cottage and reports that Mrs.
MacLane invited them to come down when the house is finished, her mother-in law replies
disjunctively: “‘I was talking to Mrs. Blake,’ the elder Mrs. Winning said as though in
agreement. ‘She says the husband was killed in an automobile accident. She had some money in
her own name and I guess she decided to settle down in the country for the boy’s health. Mrs.
Blake said he looked peakish’” (113). Unless Mrs. Blake had stopped by in the short period
while young Mrs. Winning was at the grocery store—which is highly unlikely—the older Mrs.
Winning seems to have purposely withheld this information until now, despite her daughter-in-
law’s all-consuming interest in the cottage and its new inhabitants. The older Mrs. Winning
offers this tragic story casually, as if it might somehow deflate the younger Mrs. Winning’s
excitement over Mrs. MacLane. However, her insertion goes unheeded, and as the young Mrs.
Winning continues one conversation about the lovely cottage, the older responds to her own:
“probably her people came from around here a ways back, and that’s why she’s settled in these
parts” (113).
Mrs. Winning is not the only person to take an interest in Mrs. MacLane:
Mrs. Burton, next-door to the MacLanes, ran over on the third day they were there with a
fresh apple pie, and then told all the neighbors about the yellow kitchen and the bright
electric utensils. Another neighbor, whose husband had helped Mrs. MacLane start her
furnace, explained that Mrs. MacLane was only very recently widowed. One or another
of the townspeople called on the MacLanes almost daily. (113)

But, for Mrs. Winning, Mrs. MacLane’s arrival is more than relief from the monotony of rural
life; as Alexis Shotwell suggests, Mrs. Winning can safely resist her rigidly defined identity as
reproductive laborer within the economy of the Winning family through her desire to be (or be
with) Mrs. MacLane, “a self-she-could-have-been” (124-25). But this all changes when Billy
Jones enters the picture.
166
On their way home from a walk in the country with their children, Mrs. MacLane stops
mid-sentence and asks “Who is the beautiful child?” when, from afar, she sees a “boy about
twelve, sitting quietly on a wall across the street, with his chin in his hands, silently watching
Davey and Howard” (116). Mrs. Winning hastily explains: “The Jones children are half-Negro . .
. . But they’re all beautiful children; you should see the girl. They live just outside town” (116,
emphasis added). When the women overhear first Howard and then Davey call Billy a “Nigger,”
Mrs. MacLane yells at her son and makes Davey apologize. Mrs. Winning merely tells Howard
to leave Billy alone. Then, when Mrs. MacLane asks Billy, with polite language, to come over
and he does not respond, “Mrs. Winning said sharply, ‘Billy! Billy Jones! Come here at once!’”
Mrs. MacLane again apologizes for her son’s offensive language and then, to Mrs.
Winning’s dismay, asks Billy if he would be interested in earning a little money by helping her
with her garden. When Mrs. MacLane laments “I just can’t stand that . . . to hear children
attacking people for things they can’t help,” Mrs. MacLane takes the opportunity to dissuade her
friend from following through with her offer to employ Billy:
“They’re strange people, the Joneses,” Mrs. Winning said readily. “The father works
around as a handyman; maybe you’ve seen him. You see—” she dropped her voice—“the
mother was white, a girl from around here. A local girl,” she said again, to make it more
clear to a foreigner. “She left the whole litter of them when Billy was about two, and
went off with a white man.”
“Poor children,” Mrs. MacLane said.
“They’re all right,” Mrs. Winning said. “The church takes care of them, of course,
and people are always giving them things. The girl’s old enough to work now, too. She’s
sixteen, but. . . .”
“But what?” Mrs. MacLane said, when Mrs. Winning hesitated.
“Well, people talk about her a lot, you know,” Mrs. Winning said. “Think of her
mother, after all. And there’s another boy, couple of years older than Billy.”
They stopped in front of the MacLane cottage and Mrs. MacLane touched Davey’s
hair. “Poor unfortunate child,” she said.
“Children will call names,” Mrs. Winning said. There’s not much you can do.”
167
“Well . . .” Mrs. MacLane said. “Poor child.” (118–19)
22

As in “Thrawn Janet,” news spreads fast; while putting the dinner dishes away the next
day, the elder Mrs. Winning informs her daughter-in-law that she heard from Mrs. Blake how
“your friend Mrs. MacLane was asking around the neighbors how to get hold of the Jones boy”
(119). When Mrs. Winning weakly tries to defend Mrs. MacLane’s choice by pointing out that
she needs help in her big garden, her mother-in-law quickly replies “Not that kind of help . . . .
You tell her about them?” From the pantry, Mrs. Winning explains that Mrs. MacLane feels
sorry for them and the narrator continues: “She took a long time setting the plates in even stacks
in order to neaten her mind. She shouldn’t have done it, she was thinking, but her mind refused
to tell her why. She should have asked me first, though, she thought finally” (119).
The next day, Mrs. Winning visits Mrs. MacLane for coffee and does not broach the
subject; however, while she is there, Billy’s father stops by to speak with Mrs. MacLane because
he also believes Mrs. MacLane is in the wrong for offering Billy a job, albeit for entirely
different reasons. Mr. Jones explains, “I think maybe a summer job’s too much for a boy his age,
he ought to be out playing in the good weather. And that’s the kind of work I do anyway” (120).
Mrs. Winning sits silently, “not wanting to speak in front of Mr. Jones” and again, the narrator

22
Shotwell does not take Mrs. MacLane “as the racially enlightened subject in this story, the townspeople as the
gossiping bigots, and Mrs. Winning as the accomplice to Mrs. MacLane and then the town” at face value. Rather she
suggests that the hyperbolic reaction to Mrs. MacLane’s arguably progressive behavior is informed by the initial and
irreparable transgression of miscegenation that happened years before (125–26), and which must not happen again:
“From the point of view of the townspeople we encounter in the story, Mrs. MacLane is seriously transgressing
some important norms, reenacting the sexual transgression of Billy’s unnamed white mother. From outside the story,
we can see the way her enactment of gracious whiteness depends on racial inequity: her characterization of Billy as
a (garden?) statue, her preemptory call to him to come to her so that she can apologize to him, and her assumption
(though correct) that he will need work. Her behavior, however, transforms her from someone through whom Mrs.
Winning can harmlessly expand her gender norms . . . to someone who threatens Mrs. Winning’s socially situated
self-formation. In other words, through her racial transgression, Mrs. MacLane puts Mrs. Winning’s white straight
femininity in danger. . . . In this story, as elsewhere, Jackson manifests a genius for depicting how it takes a town to
make a gender—how the communal gaze can bless and encourage, tolerate or refuse particular gender formations.
Though this gaze is petty, attending to small things, it is also life changing, and through it the norm-enforcers
usually win” (126).

168
exposes Mrs. Winning’s confusion: “She was thinking, I wish she’d ask me first, this is
impossible” (121). Mrs. MacLane is unafraid to admit her poor judgment and hires Mr. Jones
and suggests he start right away, and to make matters even worse for Helen Winning, Mrs.
MacLane invites Billy to stay and play while his father works in the garden. This is the final
straw for Mrs. Winning, who immediately sends her son Howard home. But before taking her
own leave, Mrs. Winning pressingly asks her friend: “You won’t have him working here past
today, will you? . . . . Of course you won’t have him longer than just today?” (123). Mrs.
MacLane finally understands Mrs. Winning’s meaning and when, with a tolerant smile, Mrs.
MacLane begins to protest, Mrs. Winning looks at her “for an incredulous minute, turned and
started, indignant and embarrassed, up the hill” (123).
The next day, Mrs. Winning goes to the store by herself and when she passes Davey on
her way down the hill and learns that Mrs. MacLane is in the kitchen making lemonade for the
boys, Mrs. Winning asks him to tell his mother she is in a hurry and will see her later. At the
store, Mrs. Winning runs into Mrs. Lucy Harris, who asks after “that dressed-up friend” she is
always with and Mrs. Harris begins to laugh at Mrs. MacLane’s platform sandals—“Just
couldn’t believe those shoes of hers, first time I seen them. Them shoes!” (124).
23
Mrs. Winning
escapes to the meat counter and thinks, “Mrs. Harris only says what everyone else says . . . are
they talking like that about Mrs. MacLane? Are they laughing at her?” But Mrs. Harris follows
her and comments how Mrs. MacLane has the Jones fellow working for her now (124), and the
fact that Mrs. Harris moves from Mrs. MacLane’s platform sandals to her association with that
“Jones fellow” indicates that Mrs. MacLane’s decision to hire Mr. Jones is opportune for those
members of the community who had been wary of this portentous newcomer from the start.

23
The only direct references to the Harris name in Section II are in “The Renegade” and “Flower Garden” and
in both, the name is represented by a Mrs. Harris.
169
When Mrs. Winning arrives home, her mother-in-law addresses her by her first name and
states: “I’ve got something to say to you, Helen” (125). Of course, the older Mrs. Winning has
nothing to say that Helen does not already know; rather, she seems intent on making sure her
daughter-in-law told Mrs. MacLane “about those people” before complaining about how “He’s
there every blessed day . . . . And working out there without his shirt on. He goes in the house”
(125). Later in the evening, Mr. Burton stops by on business and asks the young Mrs. Winning
“to tell your friend Mrs. MacLane to keep that kid of hers out of my vegetables” (125, emphasis
added), which supports Shotwell’s suggestion that the community is conflating Mrs. MacLane
with Billy’s white mother, who was the initial transgressor. When Mrs. Winning understandably
thinks he might mean Davey, Mr. Burton clarifies: “no, the other one, the colored boy. He’s been
running loose through our back yard. Makes me sort of mad, that kid coming in spoiling other
people’s property” (126). Seeing how Mr. Burton can hardly keep from being rude to the
Winnings on account of his anger at Mrs. MacLane, Mrs. Winning thinks “I’ve got to do
something . . . pretty soon they’ll stop coming to me first, they’ll tell someone else to speak to
me. She looked up, found her mother-in-law looking at her, and they both looked down quickly”
(126).
Perhaps it is in this brief but knowing look that Mrs. Winning fully understands that the
only “something” she can do is sever ties with Mrs. MacLane. It seems unlikely that either of the
two Mrs. Winnings believes Mr. Burton’s outlandish accusation that Billy Jones is spoiling his
vegetables, which is reminiscent of the types of grievances that influenced neighbors to accuse
neighbors of witchcraft; but, to deny it would be tantamount to accusing their neighbor of
170
lying.
24
And so, without a word of explanation, Mrs. Winning avoids Mrs. MacLane. After the
first week or so, Mrs. Winning no longer feels embarrassed about passing the cottage (126), and
after a little more time passes, she notices that Mr. Jones’ hard work is paying off: “You have to
admit, she told herself as though she were being strictly just, you have to admit that he’s doing a
lot with that garden; it’s the prettiest garden on the street” (127).
But even though she no longer spends time with Mrs. MacLane, Mrs. Winning still uses
the latter as a point of comparison. For instance, on summer evenings when the Winning family
would retire in the yard, “Mrs. Winning sometimes found an opportunity of sitting next to her
husband so that she could touch his arm; she was never able to teach Howard to run to her and
put his head in her lap, or inspire him with other than the perfunctory Winning affection, but she
consoled herself with the thought that at least they were a family, a solid respectable thing”
(128). That Mrs. Winning can so easily overlook the tragedy of Mrs. MacLane’s widowhood
reveals that she finds her own family a burden, particularly because this “solid respectable thing”
requires both her husband and son to offer only perfunctory affection. In the end, however, this
“solid respectable thing”—and here she echoes David Turner who has a similar thought about his
apartment key—seems less a consolation than a consolation prize, a meager alternative to her
imagined life in the little cottage that she briefly experiences vicariously through Mrs. MacLane.
Mrs. Winning soon discovers that her polite separation from Mrs. MacLane is too
ambiguous for her neighbors. When she runs into Mrs. Burton at the grocery store, she is
shocked when Mrs. Burton asks Mrs. Winning if it would be all right not to invite the MacLane
boy to her son Johnny’s sixth birthday party (128). Mrs. Winning feels sick for a minute, and

24
In Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1996), Robin Briggs
explains that the socio-economic hardship that attended communal living was often at the root of neighborly
disputes and accusations of witchcraft. Such grievances included trespassing of various kinds, in which fields and
crops were damaged, wood and fruit stolen, straying animals injured or killed, and so forth (152).
171
does her best to sound casual when she responds: “why do you have to ask me?” (129). As Mrs.
Burton explains that she figured Mrs. Winning might mind if Davey did not come to the party,
Mrs. Winning thinks:
Something bad has happened, somehow people think they know something about me that
they won’t say, they all pretend it’s nothing, but this never happened to me before; I live
with the Winnings, don’t I? “Really,” she said, putting the weight of the old Winning
house into her voice, “why in the world would it bother me?” Did I take it too seriously,
she was wondering, did I seem too anxious, should I have let it go? (129)

Mrs. Winning feels that she must solidify her position so that Mrs. Burton, at least, would never
again “presume to preface a question with ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’” and, with just a
few words, Mrs. Winning secures her elevated position with the community by publicly aligning
Mrs. MacLane with the original transgressor: “she’s like a second mother to Billy” (129). Mrs.
Winning continues about how Davey and Billy Jones are “together all the time now” when she
sees Mrs. MacLane regarding her from the end of the aisle (129–30). Unsure of whether she has
been overheard, Mrs. Winning cordially addresses Mrs. MacLane but as the latter moves from
the aisle, Mrs. Winning and Mrs. Burton cannot contain their laughter (130).
As the summer wears on, Mrs. Winning begins to notice that Mrs. MacLane’s garden is
suffering in the heat. Then, on one of her daily trips past the cottage Mrs. MacLane invites Mrs.
Winning in for a talk, and she follows her host up the walk “still luxuriously bordered with
flowering bushes, but somehow disenchanted” (130). Mrs. MacLane also seems to draw a
correlation between the health of her flower garden and the health of her neighborly relations;
she begins “What I wanted to ask you is, what on earth is gone wrong?” and then, because Mrs.
Winning feigns ignorance—“I don’t know what you mean”—Mrs. MacLane explains how the
neighbors used to be so nice and “the garden was going so well” (131). Mrs. MacLane has the
courage to address what has now become a painfully isolating situation but Mrs. Winning not
only takes advantage of Mrs. MacLane’s vulnerability but takes pleasure in it. Mrs. Winning
172
thinks: “I sound exactly like Mother Winning, and realized, I’m enjoying this, just as she would;
and no matter what she thought of herself she was unable to keep from adding, ‘Is something
wrong?’” (131).
Jackson often features a focal character who experiences what Hangsaman’s protagonist
Natalie perfectly describes as “the elemental fear of some other person who will not speak when
spoken to, and denies thus the similarity of sanities between one person and another, some other
person who, waiting and laughing, determines secretly and giggling to feast upon his own kind”
(211). In “Flower Garden,” the narration is concerned with representing the opposite
viewpoint—the one that denies any similarity—and as Mrs. MacLane explains how everything
has changed since she and Davey first arrived, the narrator reveals an unfamiliar voice
momentarily occupying Mrs. Winning’s mind, and one that relies on a corrupted version of the
Golden Rule:
That’s wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn’t ever talk about whether people
like you, that’s bad taste. . . .
This is dreadful, Mrs. Winning thought, this is childish, this is complaining. People
treat you as you treat them, she thought; she wanted desperately to go over and take Mrs.
MacLane’s hand and ask her to come back and be one of the nice people again (131–32,
emphasis added)

When Mrs. MacLane finishes speaking, Mrs. Winning sits up straighter in her chair and says:
“I’m sure you must be mistaken. I’ve never heard anyone speak of it” (131–32). Mrs. MacLane
makes one last attempt to speak candidly: “‘Are you sure?’ Mrs. MacLane turned and looked at
her. ‘Are you sure it isn’t because of Mr. Jones working here?’” (132). Mrs. Winning deals a
final blow when she manages to again deny Mrs. MacLane a meaningful answer: “Why on earth
would anyone around here be rude to you because of Mr. Jones?” Mrs. Winning makes her exit
and as she walks down the hill she thinks, “The nerve of her, trying to blame the colored folks’”
(132).
173
Near the end of the summer, there’s a great thunderstorm that breaks up the prolonged
heat spell (132), and a branch from the Burton’s tree crushes part of Mrs. MacLane’s garden. As
Mrs. Winning looks on the scene from afar, Mrs. MacLane says in a “clear voice carrying lightly
across the air washed clean by the storm,”
“Do you think I ought to give it up, Mr. Jones? Go back to the city where I’ll never have
to see another garden?”
Mr. Jones shook his head despondently, and Mrs. MacLane, her shoulders tired, went
slowly over and sat on her front steps and Davey came and sat next to her. Mr. Jones took
hold of the great branch angrily and tried to move it, shaking it and pulling until his
shoulders tensed with the strength he was bringing to bear, but the branch only gave
slightly and stayed, clinging to the garden.
“Leave it alone, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. MacLane said finally. “Leave it for the next people
to move!”
But still Mr. Jones pulled against the branch, and then suddenly Davey stood up and
cried out, “There’s Mrs. Winning! Hi, Mrs. Winning!”
Mrs. MacLane and Mr. Jones both turned, and Mrs. MacLane waved and called out,
“Hello!”
Mrs. Winning swung around without speaking and started, with great dignity, back of
the hill toward the old Winning house. (133–34)

Mrs. MacLane may have little choice but to admit defeat and move back to the city for Davey’s
sake, but doing so will only strengthen the communal bond and the tradition of keeping out the
Joneses (116).
“Pillar of Salt”
“How do people ever manage to get there, and [she] knew that by wondering, by admitting a
doubt, she was lost.”
–Margaret

In “‘Farther than Samarkand’: The Escape Theme in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Tooth’”
(1982), Richard Pascal sets the stage for his argument with the following premise: “For the best-
selling authoress of Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, those sprightly
autobiographical chronicles which reassuringly make light of the anxieties of bourgeois domestic
life, the fantasy of running away from it all was a constant fictional preoccupation” (133). He
then maps out the two different realms in Jackson’s fiction: the small communal group (family,
174
town, neighborhood), in which regulatory ties may chafe but they hold you together; and the city,
in which there are no ties and you must hold you together (134). Pascal is most intrigued by what
he calls Jackson’s “city experience” (136), or when a character journeys from the familiar realm
of the small town to the strange realm of the city:
Some of the most interesting moments in Jackson’s fiction are those in which the flight
from familiarity to the realm of strangeness and freedom causes a character’s sense of
identity to weaken or even vanish. Such experiences of fundamental tremors in the self’s
sense of who it is aren’t easily explicable as schizoid disturbances or breakdowns, a line
of analysis which assumes a preexistent central self to feel disturbed or beak down. What
seems to fascinate Shirley Jackson most is the possibility that behind the self which we
ordinarily assume to be irrevocably engrained, if not preordained, there is nothing
immutably necessary which we can call our own: it is for her, an idea which is both
frightening and alluring (135).

Pascal then introduces The Lottery’s “The Tooth,” first published in 1948, as an
exceptional example among Jackson’s fictional escape theme. The story documents Clara
Spencer’s all-night bus ride from her unspecified small town to New York City in order to have
her tooth extracted. Pascal argues that with the help of an imaginary figure named, of course,
Jim, who tells Clara of a beautiful island “farther than Samarkand,” Clara’s journey becomes a
brave endeavor to disavow the fragile and unsatisfying obligations of her domestic and
communal life so as instead to “embrace her mental and emotional life at its deepest level and to
accept the consequences, hazards, and indignities of that commitment” (137). As he puts it: “Jim
is a fantasy and she may be insane, but there is nonetheless a ‘happily ever after’ ring to the
story’s ending” (138):
Somewhere between here and there was her bottle of codeine pills, upstairs on the floor
of the ladies’ room she had left a little slip of paper headed ‘Extraction’; seven floors
below, oblivious of the people who stepped sharply along the sidewalk, not noticing their
occasional curious glances, her hand in Jim’s and her hair down on her shoulders, she ran
barefoot through hot sand. (286)
25

25
The phrase “Somewhere between here and there” connects “The Daemon Lover” and “The Tooth,” and the
fantastical there of Clara’s journey to “farther than Samarkand,” which influenced my decision to use this
connotation of there in my discussion of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
175
Pascal’s argument is refreshing because he not only resists a purely psychoanalytic
interpretation of “The Tooth,” so common in Jackson criticism, but he also reads “The Tooth”
against the grain and chooses not to view Clara as yet another heroine who becomes a passive
victim of destruction.
26
However, in going against the grain, he seems to want to ignore any
ambiguity in “The Tooth” and Jackson’s fiction more generally. Pascal takes Jackson’s
representation of the small communal group that is bound together by “fear, guilt, and dumb
tradition,” and allergic to “whatever is individual, different, or alien” (133-34), as a sign of its
inevitability, and in turn, he provides an overoptimistic version of the city, which not only seems
immune to the prevailing domestic ideology, but actually appears to challenge newcomers to
strip themselves of their ideologically constructed identities.
27
As a result, he arranges Jackson’s
fiction along the too easy divisions of country v. city, and communal duty v. self-gratification,
and his penchant for binary opposition is carried over into his argument about the “city
experience” (136), which is presented as either a journey of self-creation or a journey of self-
destruction. While I hesitate to deem Clara’s journey as wholly destructive, even if we read the
conclusion as fantastical and ignore that Clara is maybe insane and most definitely alone, it is
still quite difficult to support anything beyond the simple assertion that Clara has the potential
for self-creation—for, I also agree with Pascal that identity is never guaranteed.

26
Hattenhauer says that “Clara projects her denied masculine [sic?] in the figure of Jim,” and that the plot is “a
satiric parody of the quest for romantic love. The protagonist’s transition from the world of marriage to the world of
erotic fantasy is a would-be escape. But instead of leaving domesticity behind, she returns to the prison of
domesticity by way of the vestibule of romantic love. Following the chimerical Jim, she escapes the domestic dream
gone bad by pursuing the romantic myth that impelled her toward dependency in the first place. As such, she goes
from the epilogue of the metanarrative of romance back to the prologue. In her end is her beginning. She is an
emblem of the antiromantic stories studied by Marianne Hirsch” (43–44).
But there is another reason why Pascal’s argument is refreshing—namely, he does not read the narrative as
autobiography, which so many Jackson critics tend to find, to varying degrees, difficult to resist.
27
Although Pascal is speaking specifically about escape narratives, what we saw of the city in “The Daemon
Lover” and “Like Mother Used to Make” renders his description problematic.
176
Despite appearances, my point here is not to criticize Pascal’s argument; I simply want to
make space for ambiguity in his argument and show that in the “city experience,” self-discovery
and self-erasure are not so easily distinguished, regardless of the familiarity of the surroundings.
And I want to do this by examining “Pillar of Salt,” which Pascal reads as a foil to “The Tooth”:
In “Pillar of Salt,” the impression of things crumbling is continually with Margaret during
her visit to New York, and she suspects that the disintegrating buildings, streets, and
vehicles are symptomatic of the city’s effect on people: it is the place where they “come
apart.” At the end of the story she is utterly panicked by the swarming anonymity of the
crowds on the street outside, and at not being noticed familiarly. (134)

Pascal only briefly introduces “Pillar of Salt” and his assessment echoes the general consensus
that Margaret comes undone—an assessment I would be hard-pressed to refute. But I want to use
Pascal’s ideas about escape in the “city experience” as a starting place in order to explore how
“Pillar of Salt,” first published in Mademoiselle in October 1948, self-consciously engages the
relationship between writing and resisting narrative closure more than any other story in The
Lottery. To do this requires that I slightly revise Pascal’s original question—what happens to a
character who fantasizes about escaping her self and the familiar communal life when she
experiences the strange realm of the city?—and instead ask, what happens to a character who
has learned to escape from the gaze of familiar communal life when she experiences the strange
realm of the city—not alone, but accompanied by her husband? I will argue that in her
hometown of New Hampshire, it is less Margaret’s sense of self that requires the familiar
surroundings, and more Margaret’s ability to escape into the private landscape of her
imagination—an imaginary landscape that comes under assault in the city, and in turn, forces
Margaret to confront what she has been escaping for so long.
The reader is introduced to Margaret’s private world from the opening lines of the story:
For some reason, a tune was running through her head when she and her husband got on
the train in New Hampshire for their trip to New York; they had not been to New York
for nearly a year, but the tune was from farther back than that. It was from the days when
177
she was fifteen or sixteen, and had never seen New York except in movies, when the city
was made up, to her, of penthouses filled with Noel Coward people; when the height and
speed and luxury and gaiety that made up a city like New York were confused
inextricably with the dullness of being fifteen, and beauty unreachable and far in the
movies. (235)

As Margaret looks out the train window—the first of several windows she will look through, all
of which conflate the exceptionally consonant third-person narration with its focal character—
she reflects on the fortuitous circumstances that made a two-week vacation with her husband
Brad possible, she runs through a list of rather mundane conditions, and concludes on a
startlingly different image of the city:
A friend with an apartment went on a convenient vacation, there was enough money in
the bank to make a trip to New York compatible with new snow suits for the children . . .
once the initial obstacles had been overcome, as though when they had really made up
their minds, nothing dared stop them. The baby’s sore throat cleared up. The plumber
came, finished his work in two days, and left. The dresses had been altered in time; the
hardware store could be left safely, once they had found the excuse of looking over new
city products. New York had not burned down, had not been quarantined, the friend had
gone away according to schedule. (236)

Margaret’s brief but nonetheless ruinous vision is the first indication of her underlying anxiety;
however, despite the story’s allusive title, which conjures images of Sodom and Gomorrah, it
does not necessarily originate in her fear of New York City’s disintegration, though her anxiety
will develop into such a fear.
28
Rather, this imagery reveals the anxiety lying just beneath the
surface of her excitement to be actually on a train, “going farther and farther every minute from
the children, from the kitchen floor,” with “nothing to do for six hours but read and nap,” and
then vacation in New York for “two unbelievable weeks with all the arrangements made, no
further planning to do, except perhaps what theatres or what restaurants” (235–36, emphasis
added). But the title “Pillar of Salt” is nonetheless meaningful; “with nothing to do,” Margaret
finds it increasingly difficult to deny her inability to rely on her husband and his paternalistic

28
Margaret’s ruinous visions connect her to Eileen from “The Intoxicated.”
178
hospitality that likens him to the Old Testament character Lot, whose wife turns into a pillar of
salt as they escape God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:26).
29

Upon the train’s arrival, Margaret and Brad are swept up into the dizzyingly fast pace of
the city, which is emphasized by the number of passive constructions in the following passage:
The station was a momentary shelter, moving visitors gradually into a world of people
and sound and light to prepare them for the blasting reality of the street outside. She saw
it for a minute from the sidewalk before she was in a taxi moving into the middle of it,
and then they were bewilderingly caught and carried on uptown and whirled out on to
another sidewalk. . . . Upstairs in the elevator, and the key fit the door. They had never
seen their friend’s apartment before, but it was reasonably familiar . . . and the apartment
had enough of home in it to settle Brad immediately in the right chair and comfort her
with instinctive trust of the linen and blankets. (237)

Although it becomes clear only in retrospect that this description, which likens Margaret and
Brad to two automatons, is filtered through Margaret’s consciousness, the following lines
indicate that Margaret is concerned with keeping the city at a safe distance:
After the first few minutes they both went to the windows automatically; New York was
below, as arranged, and the houses across the street were apartment houses filled with
unknown people.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. There were cars down there, and people, and the noise
was there. “I’m so happy,” she said, and kissed her husband. (237, emphasis added)

The following day, after having breakfast in an automat, Margaret and Brad go to the top
of the Empire State Building, where they look for signs of “where that plane hit” (238)—a
reference to the tragic accident in July of 1945 when a bomber plane crashed into the side of the
skyscraper and killed fourteen people. Unable to see the damage, and too embarrassed to ask,
Margaret says “reasonably, giggling in a corner,” “After all . . . if something of mine got broken

29
God destroys the cities after the famous scene in which the men of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand
the host send out the two godly messengers that Lot has taken as his guests so that they can abuse them. Lot meets
this demand with a bargain—the Sodomites should take his two virgin daughters instead (19:1–9). Lot’s bargain is
never addressed in the text, and his family is spared God’s destruction of the wicked cities; however, it is on their
way out that Lot’s wife is transformed into a pillar of salt, apparently for disobeying God’s instructions and looking
back at the destruction and seeing God. There is also a popular Jewish legend that proffers that Lot’s wife is turned
into a pillar of salt because she is the one who alerts the Sodomites to Lot’s guests when, in need of salt to prepare
their meal, she asks for some from a neighbor. For more on Lot and the tradition of hospitality that places the law of
hospitality above a certain ethics, see Derrida’s Of Hospitality pp. 149–153.
179
I wouldn’t want people poking around asking to see the pieces” (238). Here, Margaret discloses
her desire to maintain a protective distance, and more significantly, an awareness of the possible
fissures in her own identity.
After this scene, the narrative glosses over several days through a succession of taxis,
each showing small signs of decay:
They traveled only in taxis the first few days, and one taxi had a door held on with a
piece of string; they pointed to it and laughed silently at each other, and on about the third
day, the taxi they were riding in got a flat tire on Broadway and they had to get out and
find another.
“We’ve only got eleven days left,” she said one day, and then, seemingly minutes
later, “we’ve already been here six days.” (238)

Margaret says this while she and Brad are on their way to a visit a friend who recently moved to
the city from New Hampshire. She is quietly musing about their upcoming weekend in Long
Island to visit other friends who rent a summer home there, and, after considering the cool
weather that has a definite autumn awareness (238), Margaret is “thinking now of getting a
sweater in one of the big stores, something impractical in New Hampshire, but probably good for
Long Island”:
“I have to do some shopping, at least one day,” she said to Brad and he groaned.
“Don’t ask me to carry packages,” he said.
“You aren’t up to a good day’s shopping,” she told him, “not after all this walking
around you’ve been doing. Why don’t you go to a movie or something?”
“I want to do some shopping myself,” he said mysteriously. Perhaps he was talking
about her Christmas present; she had thought vaguely of getting such things done in New
York; the children would be pleased with novelties from the city, toys not seen in their
home stores. At any rate she said, “You’ll probably be able to get to your wholesalers at
last.” (238–39)

This is the first of two “long” conversations between Margaret and Brad and it reveals
unspoken strains in their relationship. Although we do not know their history of shopping
together, Brad’s initial reaction to Margaret’s suggestion not only seems presumptive, but also
false, considering the number of taxis they have been taking. Then, when he mysteriously says
he wants to do some shopping himself, Margaret considers the possibility that Brad might want
180
to shop for her Christmas present when there is little indication that Brad is the sort of
considerate husband who would buy his wife a Christmas present as early as the end of summer.
And yet, she is hardly invested in this thought, which makes it seem as though Margaret prefers
to uphold the illusion of a loving husband.
The friend whose apartment they are visiting warned Margaret and Brad that his building
and the surrounding neighborhood were less than desirable. And the description of the narrow
and dark stairwell to the apartment at the top is reminiscent of the unmarked building that the
unnamed protagonist’s journey leads her to in “The Daemon Lover.” Upstairs, they discover that
their friend is hosting a small get-together, and in the crowded, unfamiliar space, Margaret
observes that city folk “sat and talked companionably about the same subjects then current in
New Hampshire, but they drank more than they would have at home and it left them strangely
unaffected” (239). When the room gets full and noisy, Margaret begins to feel overwhelmed and
she goes to a corner near a window. A stranger walks up and stands next to her, and without so
much as a glance Margaret says,
“Listen to the noise outside. It’s as bad as it is inside.”
He said, “In a neighborhood like this someone’s always getting killed.”
She frowned. “It sounds different than before. I mean, there’s a different sound to it.”
“Alcoholics,” he said. “Drunks in the streets. Fighting going on across the way.” He
wandered away, carrying his drink. (240)

But the stranger is wrong; Margaret opens the window and discovers there is a fire and
that people are shouting warnings from their windows across the way and from the street down
below. She tries to inform the other people at the party that the house is on fire though she is
“desperately afraid of their laughing at her, of looking like a fool while Brad across the room
looked at her blushing” (240). However, Margaret cannot see Brad or the host anywhere and,
surrounded by strangers, she thinks, “They don’t listen to me . . . I might as well not be here”
(241). She opens the apartment door, sees no smoke or flames, “but she was telling herself I
181
might as well not be here, so she abandoned Brad in a panic and ran without her hat and coat
down the stairs, carrying a glass in one hand and a package of matches in the other” (241). A
man catches her arm and asks if everyone is out of the house, and she replies “No, Brad’s still
there,” but when the fire trucks swing around the corner, the man says, “It’s down here,” and
leaves her. The fire is only two-doors down, but within ten minutes, the firemen extinguish it,
and Margaret goes back upstairs “slowly and with embarrassment” to find Brad and take him
home.
What happened here? Is Pascal correct to say that Margaret’s anxiety stems from her not
being recognized familiarly (134)? This is where I want to argue that Margaret is not responding
to the unfamiliarity of the situation—or, at least not only—but rather, to the incursion into her
private space that the unfamiliarity facilitates. The party setting alone is a superimposition onto
one of her fantasies; the dilapidated building in a bad neighborhood is the antithesis of
“penthouses filled with Noel Coward people” that Margaret remembers imagining when she was
young (235). When Margaret goes to the window perhaps to gain perspective from the
arrangement of the city below, as she had done earlier (237), the anonymous stranger makes it
impossible for her to distinguish between the manifold dangers of the city, let alone distance
herself from them. Although he is incorrect about the commotion outside, the fire is yet another
incursion; it is the materialization of the ruinous image that previously signified the unbelievable
reality of a vacation from her domestic routine—“New York had not burned down, had not been
quarantined” (236), but here she is, and now it is on fire. Even Brad’s absence is an unwelcome
intrusion; he is not embarrassed for her as she suspected because he is not there for her, and if
their conversation in the taxi is any indication, Margaret tries to keep this thought out of her
182
mind as well. Later that night, Brad does not explain where he had been and Margaret does not
ask:
“I was so frightened,” she said to him when they were safely in bed, “I lost my head
completely.”
“You should have tried to find someone,” he said.
“They wouldn’t listen,” she insisted. “I kept telling them and they wouldn’t listen and
then I thought I must have been mistaken. I had some idea of going down to see what was
going on.”
“Lucky it was no worse,” Brad said sleepily.
“I felt trapped,” she said. “High up in that old building with a fire; it’s like a
nightmare. And in a strange city.”
“Well, it’s all over now,” Brad said.
The same faint feeling of insecurity tagged her the next day; she went shopping alone
and Brad went off to see hard-ware, after all. (241–42)

Judy Oppenheimer remarks that “Pillar of Salt” was influenced by Jackson’s own fears of
closed spaces, traffic, chaos, and, most important, loss of identity and disintegration (103).
Admittedly, Oppenheimer says the same about a number of Jackson’s stories, but this time,
Oppenheimer’s parallel between author and protagonist seems appropriate, though mainly
because Jackson imbues Margaret with writerly qualities that distinguish her from all the other
protagonists I have discussed, including the protagonist from “The Daemon Lover.” Margaret is
incredibly perceptive and sensitive, and even as she becomes increasingly more anxious,
Margaret experiences moments of poignant insight.
For instance, when she goes shopping the next day, she provides a chilling portrait of
material capitalism, regardless of the fact that her desire to completely separate her country
lifestyle from the urban one seems to divulge Margaret’s underlying anxiety that perhaps “the
miniature mechanical civilization” is not exclusive to the city:
In the stores the prices were all too high and the sweaters looked disarmingly like New
Hampshire ones. The toys for the children filled her with dismay; they were so obviously
for New York children: hideous little parodies of adult life, cash registers, tiny pushcarts
with imitation fruit, telephones that really worked . . . miniature milk bottles in a carrying
case. “We get our milk from cows,” Margaret told the salesgirl. “My children wouldn’t
know what these were.” She was exaggerating, and felt guilty for a minute, but no one
was around to catch her.
183
She had a picture of small children in the city dressed like their parents, following
along with a miniature mechanical civilization, toy cash registers in larger and larger
sizes that eased them into the real thing, millions of clattering jerking small imitations
that prepared them nicely for taking over the large useless toys their parents lived by. She
bought a pair of skis for her son, which she knew would be inadequate for the New
Hampshire snow, and a wagon for her daughter inferior to the one Brad could make at
home in an hour. (242)

In the taxi on her way home, Margaret realizes that it is not just the taxis, but that the
whole city is in a state of gradual decay: “Corners of the buildings seemed to be crumbling away
into fine dust that drifted downward, the granite was eroding unnoticed. Every window she saw
on her way uptown seemed to be broken; perhaps every street corner was peppered with small
change” (243). Margaret also notices that the people are “moving faster than ever before” (243),
and in the following description, we find the echo of the earlier description of Margaret and Brad
as automatons being swept up into the fast pace of the city. But here, the urban machinery
appears to be going haywire,
The people seemed hurled on in a frantic action that made every hour forty-five minutes
long, every day nine hours, every year fourteen days. Food was so elusively fast, eaten in
such a hurry, that you were always hungry, always speeding to a new meal with new
people. Everything was imperceptibly quicker every minute. She stepped into the taxi on
one side and stepped out the other side at her home; she pressed the fifth-floor button on
the elevator and was coming down again, bathed and dressed and ready for dinner with
Brad. They went out for dinner and were coming in again, hungry and hurrying to bed in
order to get to breakfast with lunch beyond (243-43)

Then, on the train to Long Island to visit their other friends, Margaret thinks:
Passing through the outskirts of the city, she thought, it’s as though everything were
traveling so fast that the solid stuff couldn’t stand it and were going to pieces under the
strain, cornices blowing off and windows caving in. 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. (244)

But though all these striking passages reflect Margaret’s inability to control the immanent
collapse of her private landscape, she herself does not seem to be aware that she uses her
imagination as an “escape route” until the following day. While walking along the “oddly
184
familiar” Long Island shoreline with Brad, Margaret finds some momentary peace and
experiences a double recollection,
The beach pleased her; it was oddly familiar and reassuring and at the same time that she
realized this, the little tune came back to her, bringing a double recollection. The beach
was the one where she had lived in imagination, writing for herself dreary love-broken
stories where the heroine walked beside the wild waves; the little tune was the symbol of
the golden world she escaped into to avoid the everyday dreariness that drove her into
writing depressing stories about the beach. She laughed out loud and Brad said, “What on
earth’s so funny about this Godforsaken landscape?”
“I was just thinking how far away from the city it seems,” she said falsely. (246).

Shortly after Brad disparages the landscape for Margaret, they see a frightened girl
running toward them from the sand dunes. She’s looking for a policeman because she’s found a
severed leg. When Margaret and Brad go to look, “Brad bent down gingerly. ‘It’s a leg all right,’
he said” (247), however upon reflecting that it’s real, he uses a “voice slightly different.” But the
police are rather casual about the incident—when Brad asks if they can leave the crime scene the
policeman jokes: “’What the hell you want to hang around for?’ . . . ‘You waiting for the rest of
him?’” (247). When they tell their hosts what happened, they react nonchalantly as well, with a
mix of guilt for the bad taste of the incident and mild interest because they had recently read
about an arm that washed up in Bensonhurst (247).
30
Upstairs, “Margaret said abruptly, ‘I
suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,’ and when Brad said, ‘What starts to happen?’ she
said hysterically, ‘People starting to come apart’” (248).
They wait to catch the last train back to New York to reassure their hosts that they are not
upset about the severed leg, and back in their apartment, “it seemed to Margaret that the marble
in the house lobby had begun to age a little; even in two days there were new perceptible cracks”

30
Although Jackson may be alluding to the Bath Beach Murders (1947), Judy Oppenheimer reports that this
scene in the story was influenced by a story that Frank Orenstein relayed to the author about running into a little girl
in Brooklyn who found a leg on the street (102). However, the dismembered limbs are also reminiscent of the story
of the Levite from Ephraim in Judges 19, which Derrida discusses in conjunction with the story of Lot in Of
Hospitality, pp. 153–55. I will further elaborate on Derrida’s analysis of both of these biblical narratives in my
conclusion.
185
(248). They go to bed feeling uncomfortable and the next morning, Margaret immediately says
she is going to stay in. When Brad asks if she is upset about yesterday, Margaret must reassure
him—“Not a bit . . . . I just want to stay in and rest” (248). After breakfast at the automat (again),
Brad goes out because there are people he must see and places he must go in the few days that
remain of their vacation. Margaret sits down by the window “with the noise and the people far
below, looking out at the sky where it was grey beyond the houses across the street,” and tells
herself: “I’m not going to worry about it . . . no sense thinking all the time about things like that,
spoil your vacation and Brad’s too. No sense worrying, people get ideas like that and then worry
about them” (248). But as soon as she tells herself this, the little tune comes back into her head
with a vengeance:
The nasty little tune was running through her head again, with its burden of suavity and
expensive perfume. The houses across the street were silent and perhaps unoccupied at
this time of day; she let her eyes move with the rhythm of the tune, from window to
window along one floor. By gliding quickly across two windows, she could make one
line of the tune fit one floor of windows, and then a quick breath and a drop down to the
next floor it had the same number of windows and the tune had the same number of beats,
and then the next floor and the next. She stopped suddenly when it seemed to her that the
windowsill she had just passed had soundlessly crumpled and fallen into fine sand; when
she looked back it was there as before but then it seemed to be the windowsill above and
to the right, and finally a corner of roof. (249)

Margaret cannot keep her anxiety at bay any longer, and she leaves to get cigarettes and
letter paper on the corner. She panics in the elevator because it goes too fast, then the street
overwhelms her, but the thought of the elevator pushes her forward. Crossing the street she
nearly gets hit by truck (250), so while she makes it to the drugstore, she cannot cross the street
again. There are three pages of psycho-narration as Margaret stands on or near the corner
attempting to cross the street, observing how others do it, and worrying about how she might
seem to passersby who care to notice, though she assures herself they do not. Margaret returns to
the drugstore and leaves again, and then she returns once more and “waited for some sign of
186
recognition from the clerk and saw none; he regarded her with the same apathy as he had the first
time. He gestured without interest at the telephone,” and Margaret finally uses the phone to call
Brad:

She had no time to feel like a fool, because they answered the phone immediately and
agreeably and found him right away. When he answered the phone, his voice sounding
surprised and matter-of-fact, she could only say miserably, “I’m in the drugstore on the
corner. Come and get me.”
“What’s the matter?” He was not anxious to come.
“Please come and get me,” she said into the black mouthpiece that might or might not
tell him, “please come and get me, Brad. Please.” (252–53).

This is how “Pillar of Salt” ends, with Margaret at a complete standstill somewhere
between here and there, and the reader wondering whether or not Margaret’s condition is
permanent, as it is for Lot’s wife, or if Margaret will somehow circumvent this paralysis by
reestablishing the protective distance that the private world of her imagination had hitherto
provided. But even if she does, would this be enough? How long until Margaret’s tentative
equilibrium is disturbed again? More than the other protagonists I have discussed thus far,
Margaret divulges a writerly sensibility; however, this sensibility is still nascent and thus, there is
still only a distant possibility that Margaret might interrupt the myths that determine her
otherwise dismal narrative trajectory.
But at the same time, unlike the protagonist of “The Daemon Lover,” Margaret is forced
to a halt; she must ask her husband to recognize her and reassure her for once. Margaret is forced
to cease pretending—pretending that “it isn’t as though we didn’t know about it in advance,” as
Eileen says to the unnamed man in “The Intoxicated.”
187
Chapter Five: “On the moon . . .”: Alternative Endings in We Have Always Lived in the Castle
For my final chapter, I would like to introduce two of Shirley Jackson’s later works: the
short story “The Missing Girl,” first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction in December
1957, and her last completed novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). “The Missing
Girl” concerns the disappearance of Martha Alexandra, an adolescent girl who unexpectedly
goes out on a Monday evening and never returns to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls
Twelve to Sixteen. The story is loosely based on two, possibly related, still-unsolved missing
person cases, although to the best of my knowledge, critics have connected it only to the
disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a sophomore at the all-women Bennington College,
Vermont, who went for a hike on December 1, 1946, and never returned. Jackson and her
husband had recently moved to Bennington, Vermont when Welden went missing—it was
Stanley Edgar Hyman’s first year of teaching at the college (Oppenheimer 145)—and critics
have noted the influence of Welden’s disappearance on Hangsaman (1951), “The Missing Girl”
(1957), and “Louisa, Please Come Home” (1960) (Murphy 109, 125 n. 1).
1

“The Missing Girl” seems to have been more influenced by the unsolved disappearance
of Connie Smith, a ten-year-old camper at an overnight summer camp near Lakeville,
Connecticut. On the morning of July 16, 1952, Connie stayed behind at breakfast after being
involved in a roughhousing incident with the other girls in her tent—she received a bloody nose
and her glasses may have been broken, the details are vague in the official reports (115)—and
started walking toward Lakeville. She was a tall ten-year-old and she was seen by several people,
including the camp caretaker who thought she was a counselor, and a couple on Route 44 who
saw her hitch-hiking but decided against picking her up because “their daughter was about the

1
Although Welden was one of seven people to vanish between 1945 and 1950 in the wooded area that locals
came to refer to as the “Bennington Triangle,” her case received an unprecedented amount of coverage in the
regional and national press and precipitated the creation of the Vermont State Police (Murphy 125n.1; Dooling 78).
188
same age and how awful it was for a young girl like that to be bumming a ride” (qtd. in Dooling
122). After a series of missteps on the camp’s part, Connie was not reported missing to the police
until several hours after her last known sighting, about a half mile from Lakeville on Route 44,
which is approximately eighty miles directly south of Bennington and connected to it by Route
22.
2

But whereas the families of Paula Jean Welden and Connie Smith were desperate to find
their daughters and always held out hope, Martha Alexander’s family does the unthinkable and
the adolescent girl proves to be as invisible as Tod Donald in life and in death. Jonathan Lethem
describes “The Missing Girl” as “a hypnotic distillation of the principle of the invisibility of
victims” (“Monstrous acts and little murders”), and I agree; but I would add that once the reader
understands that Martha’s family intends to erase the last traces of the already invisible and now
missing girl, the surreal gives way to a rude awakening. Although “The Missing Girl” might be
categorized as weird fiction—as its original publication in Fantasy and Science Fiction
suggests—what makes it so horrific is that it lays bear a very painful but very ordinary truth,
which is why Mary Katherine Blackwood’s murderous refusal to be made invisible by her family
will come, in Castle, as almost a relief.
3

We only get a glimpse of Martha Alexander before she takes off, and this is from the
point of view of her thirteen-year-old roommate, Betsy, who is annoyed to the point of

2
When looking into Welden’s case, I came across Michael C. Dooling’s true crime book titled Clueless in New
England: The Unsolved Disappearances of Paula Welden, Connie Smith, and Katherine Hull (2010), in which
Dooling suggests that Welden, Smith, and Hull were all abducted by the same person (11).
3
Reading Dooling’s introduction to Katherine Hull’s 1936 disappearance reveals the stark contrast between her
missing-person case and the one’s that follow. And though Dooling is polite in his handling of Hull’s case, it still
seems clear, at least to me, that her family’s response was inadequate. Dooling says: “In the search for cases similar
to the Welden/Smith disappearances, it was easy to become sidetracked with the baffling Long Trail vanishings and
high-profile unsolved murders with different circumstances. But there was one missing person case, considerably
lower in profile, that was eventually considered solved and thus did not appear on any police department’s ‘cold
case’ list. Though there were several local news articles about this disappearance it didn’t attain the almost
supernatural aura that would enshroud the disappearances in the Green Mountains” (151).
189
exacerbation at Martha’s humming and does her best to communicate a desire for quiet by
appearing to concentrate on her Nature Book (339). Unlike most of us, who at one time or
another have silently wished that a roommate, friend, or sibling would just suddenly disappear,
Betsy’s unspoken desire comes true. Martha finally stops humming and says,
“Betsy?”
“Um?” Betsy, still trying to look as though she were studying, realized that she could
have described every movement in the room until now.
“Listen, I’m going out.”
“Where? At this time of night?”
“I’m going out anyway. I’ve got something to do.”
“Go ahead,” Betsy said; just because one could not be cross, one need not necessarily
be interested.
“See you later.”
The door slammed and Betsy, with relief and a feeling of freshness, went back to her
book. (339)

To modern readers especially, for whom it has become common knowledge that the first
forty-eight hours are the most critical in solving a homicide or a missing-person case, Betsy’s
failure to report Martha’s absence until Thursday to the Camp Mother, old Auntie Jane, is
negligent, to say the least, but Hilda (Will) Scarlett, the camp nurse, is the only one who says as
much (341). But even if Betsy had acted sooner, Chief Bill Hook and the local police force
would still have been ill-equipped to investigate Martha’s whereabouts:
In a small town such as the one lying close to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls
Twelve to Sixteen, crime is apt to take its form from characters of the inhabitants, and a
stolen dog or broken nose is about the maximum to be achieved ordinarily in the
sensational line. No one doubted Chief Hook’s complete inability to cope with the
disappearance of a girl from the camp. (342)

Aside from one fellow camper who casually notices on Tuesday that Betsy’s roommate is
absent—“You alone tonight? . . . . She out?” (340)—no one else knows that Martha is missing
until Betsy brings it to their attention, which highlights the general inattention that the campers
and camp counselors have paid to the now-missing girl.
190
In fact, this is the most heartbreaking aspect of the story. Betsy can only recall negative
details about Martha, and not just from the night she last saw her roommate—the night she
realized she could have described every movement in the room, but cannot recall what Martha is
wearing (343). When Chief Hook asks Betsy if Martha had mentioned any boys, “Betsy thought
again, remembering as well as she could the sleeping figure in the other bed, the soiled laundry
on the floor, the open suitcase, the tin boxes of cookies, the towels, the face cloths, the soap, the
pencils . . . ‘She had her own clock,’ Betsy volunteered”—a reply that is especially unsettling
when we discover this is the second summer in a row that they have roomed together (343). But
while Betsy’s disregard for Martha might be cruel, at least she has some feelings about her. Old
Auntie Jane, the Camp Mother, does not know Martha’s name or where she is from (340), and
the counselors become aware of her existence only after she disappears.
The counselors all excuse themselves: the librarian says, mysteriously, “one girl is much
like another, at this age. Their unformed minds, their unformed bodies, their little mistakes; we,
too, were young once, Captain Hook,” which is an inappropriate response to an investigation of a
lost girl, and a misnomer to prove it (345, emphasis added). The art teacher takes the opportunity
to lament the lack of talent at the camp and then says: “If I remember this girl, she did sort of
vague stuff, almost unwilling. Rejection, almost—if I can find a picture you’ll see right away
what I mean” (345). Bluebird, the nature study counselor, suggests they look on Smoky Trail
because though she has no memory of Martha, the girl may have gone to collect fern for a nature
project (344). While it is difficult to imagine the camper went to collect fern in the dark, it is
more likely than Chief Hook’s hypothesis that she absconded to a foreign country. However,
Chief Hook suddenly remembers that a hunter was lost on Bad Mountain last fall, so it was
decided they start the search there instead.
191
A house-to-house canvass uncovers the first “honest” clue—a housewife reports seeing
the figure of a girl along the road headed toward Jones Pass, the road that leads to Bad Mountain,
although she cannot say for certain it was a girl. She remembers the night best because she ate
fried clams for supper, which don’t agree with her, but she cannot recall any other details except
she thinks the figure was wearing pants and a short jacket. Of course, the police do not have a
picture of Martha because the one on her camp application “was so blurred that it resembled a
hundred other girls in the camp, it was assumed, however, from the picture, that she had dark
hair” (345). Next they find a man who had picked up a female hitchhiker who matched the
housewife’s vague description as she was wearing blue jeans and a short tan leather jacket;
however, the man explains he doesn’t think she was a camp girl, “not the way she talked, she
wasn’t any girl from Phillips camp, not her . . . Bill, you remember that youngest girl over to Ben
Hart’s?” (345–46). Rather than raise suspicions, Hook seems satisfied by the man’s cryptic but
apparently meaningful comparison to Ben Hart’s daughter.
Martha Alexander’s widowed mother, under immense grief and under the care of a
doctor, sends the girl’s uncle, who takes personal charge of the search (346). However, the only
detail we learn about the uncle’s involvement is that he puts on weight, thanks to Mrs. Hook’s
cooking (348). Will Scarlett offers her services as an amateur necromancer and seer (347), and
she tells the chief to look under the “the fourth covered bridge from the blasted oak” to which the
chief replies: “we couldn’t find no blasted oak . . . and we looked and looked—No oaks in this
part of the country at all,” he assured the girl’s uncle, with the narrator underscoring that Chief
192
Hook’s focus is on the tree, not the girl (347–48).
4
After eleven days and no progress, the chief
suggests they might as well give it up, “The boy scouts quit a week ago, and today, the girl
scouts went” (347).
The uncle does not protest that the search is called off after less than two weeks. In fact,
he says, he has some news,
“My sister wrote to me today, and she’s very upset. Naturally,” he added. . . “but listen,”
he went on, “what she says is that of course she loves Martha and all that, and of course
no one would want to say anything about a girl like this that’s missing, and probably had
something horrible done to her . . .” He looked around again, and again, everyone
nodded. “But she says,” he went on, “that in spite of all that . . . well . . . she’s pretty sure,
what I mean, that she decided against Phillips Educational Camp for Girls. What I mean,”
he said, looking around again, “she has three girls and a boy, my sister, and of course we
both feel terribly sorry and of course we’ll still keep in our end of the reward and all that,
but what I mean is . . .” He brushed his hand across his forehead again. “. . . What I mean
is this. The oldest girl, that’s Helen, she’s married and out in San Francisco, so that’s her.
And—I’ll show you my sister’s letter—the second girl, that’s Jane, well, she’s married
and she lives in Texas somewhere, has a little boy about two years old. And then the third
girl—well that’s Mabel, and she’s right at home with her mother, around the house and
whatnot. Well—you see what I mean?” (348)

No one nods and the uncle goes on to describe the boy in Denver but Chief Hook cuts him off
with a resounding “Never mind,” and then wearily rises, and to no one in particular, says it’s
nearly suppertime (348).
It is only when Old Jane responds that we fully understand the unbelievable thing that has
just been suggested:
Old Jane nodded and shuffled the papers in her hand. “I have all the records here,” she
said. “Although a girl named Martha Alexander applied for admission to the Phillips
Educational Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, her application was put into the file
marked ‘possibly undesirable’ and there is no record of her ever having come to the
camp. Although her name has been entered upon various class lists, she is not noted as
having participated personally in any activity; she has not, so far as we know, used any of
her dining room tickets or her privileges with regard to laundry and bus services, not to

4
Just for comparison: After nine months and still no trace of Connie Smith, her father went to Richmond, VA to
consult Lady Wonder, a clairvoyant horse—yes, as in the animal—who had assisted detectives in locating the body
of a four-year-old Massachusetts boy who had been missing for almost a year. Lady Wonder pointed Mr. Smith to
Los Angeles, where “Armed with 10,000 missing person circulars, he connected with police and reporters and tried
his best to find her. While there, he even appeared on a national television show . . . and made an impassioned plea
for help from the public.” Unfortunately, nothing ever came of Lady Wonder’s prediction (Dooling 129–32).
193
mention country dancing. She has not used the golf course nor the tennis courts, nor has
she taken out any riding horses. She has never, to our knowledge, and our records are
fairly complete, sir, attended any local church—”
“She hasn’t taken advantage of the infirmary” said Will Scarlett, “or psychiatric
services.”
“You see?” said the girl’s uncle to Chief Hook.
“Nor,” finished Old Jane quietly, “nor has she been vaccinated or tested for any
vitamin deficiency whatsoever.” (349)

The girl’s mother, her uncle, the camp mother, and the chief of police—they tacitly agree to
vanish the “possibly undesirable” Martha Alexander. They dis-miss her from memory and
history. And they can do this because Martha had been invisible long before she disappears; as
the fourth daughter, she is an inessential member to her family and an undifferentiated camper in
an indifferent camp community. Martha is even superfluous to Jackson’s story—she has a few
lines but nothing more. Martha is not a focal character; she is given no defining traits, and any
extra could play her part, which is what makes “The Missing Girl” so relentless. And later, when
an unidentified body is buried in Martha’s name—and the name of the family that denied her—
the narrative exclusion of is complete:
A body that might have been Martha Alexander’s was found, of course, something over a
year later, in the late fall when the first light snow was drifting down. The body had been
stuffed away among some thorn bushes, which none of the searchers had cared to tackle,
until two small boys looking for a cowboy hideout had wormed their way through the
thorns. It was impossible to say, of course, how the girl had been killed . . . but it was
ascertained that she had been wearing a black corduroy skirt, a reversible raincoat, and a
blue scarf.
She was buried quietly in the local cemetery; Betsy, a senior huntsman the past
summer but rooming alone, stood for a moment by the grave, but was unable to recognize
any aspect of the clothes or the body. Old Jane attended the funeral, as befitted the head
of the camp, and she and Betsy stood alone in the cemetery by the grave. Although she
did not cry over her lost girl, Old Jane touched her eyes occasionally with a plain white
handkerchief, since she had come up from New York particularly for the services. (349)

When Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood was twelve-years-old, which is about the
same age as Martha Alexander and Tod Donald, the lovable murderer and narrating protagonist
of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, rebelled against her invisibility. An avid reader of fairy
tales and history, she found a way to write herself back into her family’s narrative before it was
194
too late. Mary Katherine is the most writerly of Jackson’s protagonists—her literariness is
inscribed in her own name—but while scholars often note the allusiveness of Blackwood and
Rochester, her mother’s maiden name, it is Mary Katherine’s first name that is the most
significant to understanding how Merricat gained control of her own narrative.
5
Her first name
refers to Madame Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the influential early-seventeenth-century conteuse
who wrote literary fairy tales for an upper-class public, which endorse shaking up the status quo
in certain ways, “particularly concerning women’s place and power in society, while maintaining
the aristocracy’s power and privilege” (Farrell 28).
6
Merricat’s nickname echoes the perfectly
hospitable feline protagonist of d’Aulnoy’s “La Chatte blanche,” who, in a first-person narrative
within the fairy tale, tells the prince the story of how she, a beautiful and educated princess, was
cast under an evil fairy spell that can only be broken if her suitor chops off her head—marriage
as decapitation perfectly expresses the danger that Cousin Charles will later pose.
7

With the help of her twenty-two-year-old sister Constance, Merricat deposed the
Blackwood patriarchy with a radical typology of fairy tale—the sisterly sisters defeated the
Bluebeard and the evil queen at their own game. The sisters never discussed it (130), but when

5
Blackwood refers to the Scottish publisher William Blackwood and his popular Blackwood’s Magazine, which
was famous for its selection of Gothic and horror stories; and Rochester, also connects Mary Katherine to Gothic
romance through the brooding Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).
6
In “The Heroine’s Violent Compromise: Two Fairy Tales by Madame d’Aulnoy,” Marcy Farrell says that her
overtly political texts “consistently criticize bad rulers for their abuses of power and rail against masculine power
over women’s lives. Violence in her tale is often a key element in her portrait of offensive monarchs or their
counselors; it is also a characteristic of odious husbands” (28).
7
Farrell explains that the “prince’s violent act and Chatte Blanche’s insistence on this violence are the
necessary condition for the unveiling of her identity, and, of her liberation,” and ultimately the tale “implies that
violence is a necessary compromise that women must eventually make in order to achieve and retain power in the
world” (35). The violence in d’Aulnoy’s tales is often tied to “the critique of women who betray female solidarity in
the pursuit of their own power” (28). The fact that Constance and Merricat are in solidarity is significant—not only
to d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales but to fairy tales in general—and I am interested in exploring if and how the novel might be
read as a postmodern retelling of the fairy tale.
While Jackson referred to Merricat and Constance as doubles—in 1960, when she was having trouble
composing the novel, Jackson wrote an unsent letter to Howard Nemerov explaining that the problem was that she
was writing about “two halves of the same identity” (qtd. in Oppenheimer 292, 233)—it becomes more clear in light
of “La Chatte blanche” how the sisters might be read as one person and in direct comparison to Jekyll and Hyde. Of
course, there are other elements in Castle that seem to underline Constance and Merricat as two separate beings, and
this is how scholars have tended to discuss the novel.
195
Merricat put arsenic in the sugar bowl, she knew that her sister never eats berries and rarely takes
sugar on anything (32), just as Constance knew the sugar bowl was poisoned when she placed it
on the dinner table to accompany the blackberries she served for dessert (37). Everyone died
except Uncle Julian, who sustained physical and cognitive injuries.
8
They each kept their
unspoken vow of silence when the older sister was arrested and charged with mass murder, and
the younger sister was sent to an orphanage. Merricat was never suspected, at least not as far as
we know, because the twelve-year-old had been punished and sent to bed without her supper
(56), which was not unusual for the supposedly “wicked, disobedient child” (34). Despite the
fact that Constance had bought the arsenic, cooked the dinner, set the table, saw them dying
around her like flies, called the doctor too late, washed the sugar bowl, and then told the police
“those people deserved to die” (36–37), she was acquitted. And so, Merricat was released from
the orphanage, Uncle Julian was placed under Constance’s care, and the revised Blackwood
family moved back to the large private estate situated on the edge of the village.
9

When Merricat sets her story on a Friday in late April, six years have passed since the
Blackwood sisters returned to the house of their father. While they still uphold many of the
Blackwood family traditions, the two sisters have adapted them to an alternative lifestyle, and
one filled with love and mutual respect. Merricat is sensitive to Constance’s agoraphobia, which
keeps her confined to the large house and the garden; Constance enjoys Merricat’s whimsical
imagination and encourages her belief in magic. She also abides by the curious self-imposed
rules that Merricat has created for herself, which mostly concern Merricat’s not being allowed to

8
Six years later he still has periods of great clarity and humor, and a remarkably good attitude—he even
declares that in some ways, he has had extraordinarily good fortune, “I am a survivor of the most sensational case of
the century. I have all the newspaper clippings, I knew the victims, the accused, intimately . . . . I have exhaustive
notes on all that happened” (32). In any case, after reading “The Missing Girl,” I think that this seems like another
instance of poetic justice.
9
Although the setting is never made explicit, scholars seem to agree that the novel is set in New England, based
not only on Jackson’s general association with New England Gothic, but also, the parallels between the Blackwood
poisonings and the Borden murders in Fall River, MA.
196
handle foodstuff (20). And rather astonishingly, the girls are accustomed to their uncle’s belief
that Merricat died in an orphanage of neglect (93). Then again, not seeing Mary Katherine is
within keeping of the Blackwood patriarchal tradition.
10

Merricat has structured their new life around a weekly pattern, and as I will show, she
actually uses it to organize her narrative. On Fridays and Tuesdays, Merricat goes to the village
for groceries and library books (1–2), and on Friday afternoons, the Blackwood sisters have Mrs.
Helen Clarke, the prominent member of the “small society” the sisters still keep, over for tea
(21). On Mondays, they neaten the house, and on Wednesdays, Merricat makes any necessary
repairs to the fence encircling the Blackwood property (18).
11
On Thursdays, Merricat’s most
powerful day, she goes into the attic and dresses in their clothes (her parents’ clothes,
presumably). On Saturdays, Merricat helps Constance in the garden (41–42), but when the
kitchen clock reads 11:20 a.m., Constance goes upstairs and out of sight before Dr. Levy arrives
to check on Uncle Julian (45). And on Sundays, Merricat examines her magical safeguards
protecting the Blackwood Farm—the box of silver dollars buried near the creek, the doll buried
in the field, and Mr. Blackwood’s notebook nailed to the tree in the pine woods—believing that
“as long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us.” Merricat reveals
that her love of magic has long served strategic purposes,
I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the
long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew
taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the
creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. “Here is treasure for you to bury,”

10
Not that it is impossible that Mary Katherine died, and is now a fairy or a ghost. Jackson left lots of ambiguity
surrounding the identity of these sisters.
11
Mr. Blackwood erected the fence in order to block public use of the path that connected the village to the bus
stop at the highway four-corners—a shortcut that saved the people of the village about a quarter-mile walk. Mrs.
Blackwood declared that “The highway’s built for common people . . . and my front door is private” (18).
The Blackwoods own all the land between the highway and the river (4), and now that Merricat’s parents are
dead and the hostility between the village and the sisters has intensified, Merricat appreciates the fence more than
ever. However, her faith does not rest in the fence or the easily broken padlocks on the gates, but rather in the signs
on the gates that read “PRIVATE NO TRESSPASSING,” which Merricat believes no one could go past (18).
197
Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I
had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they
would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly
inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones,
all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut
web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us. (41)

While they share a few of the chores around the house, as Constance’s name suggests,
her day-to-day is more consistent (and consistently busier) than Merricat’s, and involves taking
care of Julian, tending the garden, and lovingly preparing the meals—including food for Jonas,
Merricat’s black cat—with the fruits and vegetables she grows.
12
Constance has also worked all
her life at adding to the great supply of food in the cellar, and thus carrying on the longstanding
tradition of the Blackwood women.
13
Merricat explains,
There were jars of jam made by great-grandmothers, with labels in thin pale writing,
almost unreadable by now, and pickles made by great-aunts and vegetables put up by
our grandmother, and even our mother had left behind her six jars of apple jelly.
Constance had worked all her life at adding to the food in the cellar, and her rows and
rows of jars were easily the handsomest, and shone among the others. “You bury food
the way I bury treasure,” I told her sometimes, and she answered me once: “The food
comes from the ground and can’t be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be
done with it.” All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground
and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled
vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green stood side by side in our
cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women. Each year
Constance and Uncle Julian and I had jam or preserve or pickle that Constance had
made, but we never touched what belonged to the others; Constance said it would kill us
if we ate it. (42)

For six years, this is how the Blackwood sisters have patterned their days and their
weeks, season after season. As Merricat puts it, “We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the
summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it” (45). The Blackwoods

12
Viewed through “La Chatte blanche,” Constance, whom Merricat compares to a fairy princess, would be the
constant of the double relationship.
13
In “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the
Castle” (1984), Lynnette Carpenter correctly dispels the binary relationship that Merricat and Constance appear to
represent, “At first glance, theirs may appear to be a relationship between opposites—Constance, the domestic,
traditional, even unimaginative one, and Merricat, the unrestrained, creative, imaginative one. Yet Merricat’s self-
imposed rules and her insistence on routine reveal an obsession with order, just as Constance’s skill at growing and
preparing food reveals her creativity. Although Merricat’s rules do not allow her to prepare food, she helps
Constance in the kitchen and garden. Merricat’s knowledge of poisonous plants, upon which she bases much of her
claim to magical power, comes from Constance” (33).
198
do not accept mail, they do not have a telephone—both became unbearable in the wake of
Constance’s trial (5)—and it is easy to forget that their microcosmic community exists in the
modern world. Because they inherited Mr. Blackwood’s estate and can afford to maintain their
reclusive lifestyle, they live almost entirely independent of the village.
14
But while Merricat and
Constance both love to read and prefer the books at the village library to those in Mr.
Blackwood’s study (2), it is really only the grocery (for eggs, dairy, and meat to supplement the
food from the garden) and the doctor (for Julian) that keep them connected to the larger
community and within the temporal somewhere between the here of history and the there of
Merricat’s fantastical haven on the moon (15).
And yet, before Merricat begins her retrospective narrative of how the sisters end up on
the there of the moon, sequestered in the ruins of the Blackwood “castle,” she tells us that the
library books still stand on the kitchen shelf. When she mentions this on the opening page, we do
not know that two days after the Friday in late April when Merricat begins her story, Cousin
Charles, the demon-ghost of Merricat’s father, will arrive to reinstate the Blackwood patriarchy,
and that in a last-ditch effort to exorcize him, Merricat sets fire to her beloved house. We do not
know that after the firefighters extinguish the flames, the fire chief, Jim Donell, incites the
villagers to vandalize the bottom story of the house that remains, nearly destroying all of the
Blackwood family’s material possessions. Nor does the reader know that Merricat is no longer
allowed to bury things to keep the ground firm beneath them (140), and that her “new magical
safeguards were the lock on the front door, and the boards over the windows, and the barricades

14
Merricat explains that their financial security further aggravates the villagers longstanding hostility toward
the Blackwoods: “The people of the village disliked the fact that we always had plenty of money to pay for
whatever we wanted; we had taken our money out of the bank, of course, and I knew they talked about the money
hidden in our house, as though it were great heaps of golden coins and Constance and Uncle Julian and I sat in the
evenings, our library books forgotten, and played with it, running our hands through it and counting and stacking
and tumbling it, jeering and mocking behind locked doors.” (7)
199
along the sides of the house” (145). But there the library books are, right on the very first page,
after the famous opening paragraph that is too wonderful to leave out:
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-
cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than
five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had
known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen
shelf. We rarely moved things; the Blackwoods were never much of a family for
restlessness and stirring. We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books
and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had always a solid foundation of
stable possessions. We always put things back where they belonged. We dusted and
swept under tables and chairs and beds and pictures and rugs and lamps, but we left
them where they were; the tortoise-shell toilet set on our mother’s dressing table was
never off place by so much as a fraction of an inch. Blackwoods had always lived in our
house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a
place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of
Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world. (1)

What does it mean that the library books have been taken out of circulation? How are we
to interpret that the books, which are the property of the village library, are treated as stable
Blackwood possessions, and that, in the tradition of a family that rarely moves things and always
puts things back where they belong, these books will remain forever on the shelf?
15
To start, we
must keep in mind that by this point, the Blackwood tradition is a tradition twice revised, and
that Merricat’s description of the Blackwoods as a family uninterested in restlessness or stirring
is only partially true when it comes to Mary Katherine herself (1). After all, it seems that
Merricat is willing to do anything, including the unworking of her own microcosmic community
with Constance and Uncle Julian, if it means resisting the phallocratic strain of the Blackwood
tradition that seeks to keep the Blackwood women in its order. We must therefore also keep in
mind that even though Merricat exorcizes the ghost of the Blackwood patriarchy, she has learned

15
When surveying the damage to their kitchen, Merricat observes, “The library books were still on their shelf,
untouched, and I supposed that no one had wanted to touch books belonging to the library; there was a fine, after all,
for destroying library property” (117).
200
that there is no always in community, and that there is (necessarily) no guarantee that the
barricades surrounding the house are any more effective than her magical safeguards for keeping
people out or in.
To this extent, the shelved library books seem to represent, simultaneously, the sisters’
complete withdrawal from one type of community or communal discourse (mythos, logos), and
entrance into a different kind of community and discourse—a communication that does not
circulate in a common, capitalist exchange (Nancy 74).
16
Within Merricat’s narrative, this
communication begins at the limit, on the threshold of the Blackwood home, where the village
men deliver food baskets prepared by the village women (138), and Merricat and Constance
clean the napkins and set the empty baskets back on the doorstep where they find them.
However, this ritualistic-like offering becomes more ambivalent when we consider the uncanny
correspondences between We Have Always Lived in the Castle and “The Man in the Woods.”
17

Although Uncle Julian dies in the fire and there is currently no “man in the woods,” Merricat and
Constance, who are now confined to the kitchen, nonetheless bear a “family resemblance” to
Circe and Aunt Phyllis, particularly when Constance helps Merricat refashion one of their
tablecloths into a robe (136). And of course, there is Jonas, the Grimalkin-like black cat. Before
we can better make sense of the relationship between the two pairs of sisters, and what this might
mean for Merricat and Constance, we must return to the library with the library books, which is
the “Start” of Merricat’s story, both literally and literarily.

16
The first is perhaps the only type of community if we are to agree that the very basis of society and culture is
the exchange of women among men that began with the incest taboo (Irigaray, This Sex 170–71).
17
The familial/communal configuration in Castle: Merricat/Constance/Uncle Julian/Jonas/Charles and in “The
Man in the Woods,” Circe/Constance/Mr. Oakes/Grimalkin/Christopher.
201
On the fine Friday morning in late April when Merricat takes the routine trip to the
village that turns out to be her last, she describes the game she plays when she does her
shopping:
I thought about the children’s games where the board is marked into little spaces and
each player moves according to a throw of the dice; there were always dangers, like
“lose one turn” and “go back four spaces” and “return to start,” and little helps, like
“advance three spaces” and “take an extra turn.” The library was my start and the black
rock was my goal. I had to move down one side of Main Street, cross, and then move up
the other side until I reached the black rock, when I would win. I began well, with a
good safe turn along the empty side of Main Street, and perhaps this would turn out to
be one of the very good days; it was like that sometimes, but not often on spring
mornings. If it was a very good day I would later make an offering of jewelry out of
gratitude. (5)

Similar to Margaret in “Pillar of Salt,” Merricat envisions herself as a pawn in what is a
decidedly textual game; however, Merricat is a more active participant and strategizes by
imagining different scenarios and choosing the least dreadful move. Although in reality,
Merricat’s route through the village is largely predetermined—she cannot avoid Main Street if
she is to do her shopping, and besides, she is burdened by her own fixation with routine—
Merricat uses the game to distract and distance herself from the villagers. In between rolls of the
dice, she familiarizes the reader with the gloomy inferiority of the village, which she explains is
all “of a piece, a time, and a style . . . as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and
fed on it” (6), and her violent fantasies: “I thought about the burning black and painful rot that
ate away from the inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village” (6).
18

18
When describing the incongruous landscape of the village, Merricat self-consciously engages with the literary
(and aristocratic) heritage alluded to in her name. She depicts the dichotomous relationship between the drab village
architecture (a setting characteristic of New England Gothic) and the fine houses (characteristic of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century British Gothic) as the outcome of a Gothic fantasy: “The houses and the stores seemed to have
been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and the Rochester house and
the Blackwood house and even the town hall had been brought here perhaps accidentally from some far lovely
country where people lived with grace. Perhaps the fine houses had been captured—perhaps as punishment for the
Rochesters and the Blackwoods and their secret bad hearts?—and were held prisoner in the village; perhaps their
slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers. The row of stores along Main Street was unchangingly grey. . . .
whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village. The blight on the village never came from the
Blackwoods; the villagers belonged here and the village was the only proper place for them” (6).
202
Merricat’s first move is to go from the library to Elbert’s Grocery. She can either walk
directly across the street, which would mean she would have to pass the general store, and more
specifically, the men who sit on the benches in front of the general store—“In this village the
men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and
stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home”—or she can stay on this side of the
street and walk past the post office and then cross the street when she reaches the Rochester
house (3). Because she will have to walk by the general store on her way to Stella’s for a cup of
coffee and then home, and cannot bear to walk past the gossiping men twice, she chooses to say
on this side of the street. She reasons that at least old Miss Dutton in the post office never does
her staring out in the open, like the rest of the folks, but nevertheless, she hates to walk by the
Rochester house, which was the loveliest house in town and where her mother was born.
But her decision is made and she takes a deep breath and walks quickly, watching her
feet moving one after another; “two feet in our mother’s old brown shoes” (5).
19
She does not
look at the Rochester house, where the Harlers have amassed piles of junk that Merricat
genuinely believes they love (3), but still wonders if the Harler people know that they live in a
house that should have belonged to Constance, although she does not tell the reader why (4–5).
20

She also wonders if they “lived inside the way they did outside, sitting in old bathtubs and eating
their dinner off broken plates set on the skeleton of an old Ford car, rattling cans as they ate, and
talking in bellows. A spray of dirt always lay across the sidewalk where the Harlers lived” (5).

19
Two feet in our mother’s old brown shoes—another cue to view Merricat and Constance as doubles,
especially in relation to Jekyll and Hyde.
20
Merricat actually says this twice but never clarifies why, exactly, the house should be Constance’s by right—
whether something specific happened, or if she is simply critiquing the general principle of primogeniture in which
the eldest son would inherit the property. This appears to be the custom in the Blackwood house, considering what
Merricat tells us about the Blackwood wives, and Julian’s description of Thomas as a miniature Mr. Blackwood. In
any case, I do imagine that she means something along these lines as opposed to Hattenhauer’s suggestion that
“Apparently Merricat wants to have it just so no one else will” (187).
203
Elbert’s Grocery is directly opposite the Rochester house, and crossing the street is
another roll of the dice. Merricat again echoes Margaret in “Pillar of Salt” when she says she
“always hesitated, vulnerable and exposed” as the traffic went by. Because most of the traffic on
Main Street, which is also the highway, passes through with the drivers hardly glancing at her,
Merricat explains that she
could tell a local car by the quick ugly glance from the driver and I wondered, always,
what would happen if I stepped down from the curb onto the road; would there be a
quick, almost unintended swerve toward me? Just to scare me, perhaps, just to see me
jump? And then the laughter, coming from all sides, from behind the blinds in the post
office, from the men in front of the general store, from the women peering out of the
grocery doorway, all of them watching and gloating, to see Mary Katherine Blackwood
scurrying out of the way of a car. I sometimes lost two or even three turns because I
waited so carefully for the road to clear in both directions before I crossed. (6)

Once she makes it across the street safely, Merricat’s next move depends on how many children
happen to be in market. She is afraid of them because if they touched her, “the mothers would
come at me like a flock of taloned hawks; that was always the picture I had in my mind—birds
descending, striking, gashing with razor claws.” Much to her relief, there are no children and not
many women inside, and Merricat thinks, “take an extra turn” (7).
Of course, the tension in the grocery is still palpable, and characteristically Jacksonesque.
She can feel the few women who are in the store watching her from behind as Mr. Elbert and his
“pale greedy wife” wait on Merricat immediately to have her back on her way as soon as
possible (7). Merricat knows that Mrs. Donell is somewhere inside because she saw her as she
entered, and “I wondered as I had before if she came on purpose when she knew I was coming,
because she always tried to say something; she was one of the few who spoke” (8). What is so
refreshing about Merricat is that unlike Mrs. Walpole in “The Renegade,” for instance, who
simply tries her best not to look intimidated by Mr. Kittredge and the other customer in the
204
grocery, Merricat nudges back when she humorously preys on the villagers’ fear. She reads her
order to Mr. Elbert,
“A small leg of lamb,” I said, “my Uncle Julian always fancies a roasted lamb in the
first spring days.” I should not have said it, I knew, and a little gasp went around the
store like a scream. I could make them run like rabbits, I thought, if I said to them what
I really wanted to, but they would only gather again outside and watch for me there.
“Onions,” I said politely to Mr. Elbert, “coffee, bread, flour. Walnuts,” I said, “and
sugar; we are very low on sugar.” Somewhere behind me there was a little horrified
laugh, and Mr. Elbert glanced past me, briefly, and then to the items he was arranging
on the counter. (8)
21

When Mrs. Donell finally speaks up—“The Blackwoods always did set a fine table”— Mary
Katherine does not turn, it is enough “without looking into their flat grey faces with the hating
eyes” (8). She wishes they were all dead, and longs to say it out loud:
I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the
Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help
myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from
the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was
never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s
wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway,
and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

Commenting on the reader’s uneasy sympathy with Merricat, Lynette Carpenter cites this
scene specifically and suggests that early in the novel, Merricat’s violent fantasies are horrifying
and “The villager’s hostility, although misdirected if they believe the poisoner to be Constance
and not Merricat, might at first seem a justifiable response to a daughter’s particularly cruel
murder of four members of her family” (36). Carpenter concludes that the villager’s own
violence later “invalidates once and for all their moral judgment of the sisters and indicates the
poisoning is only one violent action in a world where violence threatens to erupt at any
moment,” and ultimately Merricat’s rage is justified (36). While I do not contend that a first-time
reader, particularly one who is unfamiliar with Jackson’s Gothic, would find the violence of this

21
The full effect of this passage is in retrospect, because at this point in the narrative, the first-time reader does
not know that Constance was on trial for poisoning her family by putting arsenic in the sugar bowl, and that she
served lamb for dinner that night (35).
205
fantasy disturbing, I do think that her fantasy—and we must remember that it is one—is
justifiable without the villagers’ subsequent vandalism. Merricat is also underscoring a very deep
and genuine feeling of betrayal.
22

Merricat’s vision of the mothers coming at her like a flock of taloned hawks to protect
their children is revealing; it is in stark contrast with how her parents treated her as a child—she
was punished, not protected—and illustrates that the tradition has continued in their absence.
Granted, the village mothers’ misdirected hatred is problematic because Merricat did, indeed,
poison her family, but they do not know that, and besides, Constance was acquitted. More to the
point, Merricat’s memories of that period reveal that no one—not her father’s brother Arthur,
Charles’s father, nor any of her neighbors—felt a jot of sympathy for her given that, at least as
far as they knew, the only reason Merricat was alive was because she had been sent to bed
without supper, and there was no longer anyone to take care of her. When Constance, the
accused, attended the Blackwood funerals, Merricat was already lying on her bed in the
orphanage, which indicates she must have been sent there almost immediately (116).
Now Merricat only receives attention because Constance has retreated from public view;
She is visible insofar as she is the sole representative of the Blackwood family, and thus, the sole
recipient of the villagers’ grievances. Such grievances are not confined to the murders, but
concern a very deep-rooted resentment of the Blackwood wealth, and we witness this as Merricat
continues her journey around Main Street. She stops in the doorway of the grocery in
preparation, “feeling around inside myself for some thought to make me feel safe. . . . I froze my
face hard. Today I was going to think about taking our lunch out into our garden,” and plays the
scene out as she makes her way (9). Unfortunately, she cannot block out the men’s voices:

22
I am perhaps underestimating the class antagonism here, and one which she and Constance uphold until after
the fire.
206
“That’s one of the Blackwood girls,” I heard one of them say in a high mocking voice,
“one of the Blackwood girls from Blackwood Farm.” “Too bad about the Blackwoods,”
someone else said, just loud enough, “too bad about those poor girls.” “Nice farm out
there,” they said, “nice land to farm. Man could get rich, farming the Blackwood land. If
he had a million years and three heads, and didn’t care what grew, a man could get rich.
Keep their land pretty well locked up, the Blackwoods do.” “Man could get rich.” “Too
bad about the Blackwood girls.” “Never can tell what’ll grow on Blackwood land.
I am walking on their bodies, I thought, we are having lunch in the garden and Uncle
Julian is wearing his shawl. (10)

As Carpenter asserts, if the Blackwood wealth was an affront from the start, in the hands of
women it is a travesty (Carpenter 34); and it is only because it is in the hands of women that the
men reveal their disdain openly, and none so openly as Jim Donell, who confronts Merricat
during her last stop in her journey around the village.
Although Merricat says she goes to Stella’s out of pride, she indicates that she has a deep
attachment to the coffee shop when she recounts “Constance and I had come in here to spend
pennies after school and every afternoon we picked up the newspaper to take home for our father
to read in the evening” (11). Merricat may also stop by Stella’s in an effort to leave the village
with a slightly more positive outlook:
I sometimes thought when I wished all the village people dead that I might spare Stella
because she was the closest to kind that any of them could be, and the only one who
managed to keep hold of any color at all. She was round and pink and when she put on a
bright print dress it stayed looking bright for a little while before it merged in to the dirty
grey of the rest. (11)

But as soon as Stella sets her coffee down, Jim Donell appears in the doorway, and Merricat
knows today she has bad luck. Like Mrs. Donell, Jim is among the people in the village that have
real faces that Merricat knows and hates individually; the Donells “were deliberate instead of just
hating dully and from habit like the others. Most people would have stayed down at the end of
the counter where Stella waited, but Jim Donell came right to the end where I was sitting and
took the stool next to me” (12). With Jim so close, Merricat cannot just get up and leave quietly
as she prefers to do if people come in while she is there (11).
207
Jim Donell starts in immediately, “they tell me you’re moving away.” When Merricat
replies “no,” he brings Stella into the conversation—“Who do you think would of started a story
like that, Stella? Who do you think would want to tell me they’re moving away when they’re
not doing any such thing?”—and though Stella shakes her head at him, Merricat thinks she can
tell Stella’s trying not to smile. Almost as soon as Stella does tell Jim to leave Merricat alone,
Joe Dunham, the carpenter, enters the shop and now Jim Donell has someone to play along with
his feigned dismay:
“I was saying to people only this morning it’s too bad when the old families go.
Although you could rightly say a good number of the Blackwoods are gone already.” He
laughed, and slapped the counter with his hand. “Gone already,” he said again. The
spoon in his cup was still, but he was talking on. “A village loses a lot of style when the
fine old people go. Anyone would think,” he said slowly, “that they wasn’t wanted.”
“That’s right,” Dunham said, and he laughed.
“The way they live up in their fine old private estate, with their fences and their
private path and their stylish way of living.” He always went on until he was tired. (13–
14)

Neither Jim nor Joe takes heed of Stella, and they continue in this vein, with Joe recalling
the time that he fixed a broken step for the Blackwood sisters and never got paid, which Merricat
admits to the reader is true, but she says it is because he did not do what he was asked and when
she told him so, Dunham looked satisfied and ripped out the piece of wood he had just nailed
down. Finally, Stella intervenes and tells Merricat to go along home, “There won’t be any peace
around here until you go” (15), and Jim takes advantage of the opportunity to get one final
comment, “You just say the word, Miss Mary Katherine, and we’ll all come out and help you
pack. Just you say the word, Merricat” (15).
Merricat leaves, and from here to the black rock, she just has to pass the town hall, and
she says she has nothing to fear from the people there so long as she does not fish out of season
(15). However, she does not realize until she passes the corner by the town hall that the Harris
boys are in their front lawn clamoring and quarrelling with a dozen other boys (15). As she
208
prepares to walk by, she tries to imagine she is living on the moon but the boys see her at once
and her violent fantasies resume (16). But then we understand why she is so hateful; like many
memorable notorious (suspected) criminals, including Lizzie Borden, “Connie Blackwood” has
inspired a nursery rhyme: “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? / Oh no, said
Merricat, you’ll poison me. / Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? / Down in the
boneyard ten feet deep!” (16).
23

This is the final stretch of her journey before reaching the black rock, and as the boys
continue to sing as she passes by, Merricat tries to achieve an even greater distance from her
surroundings and tells the reader
It was strange to be inside myself, walking steadily and rigidly past the fence, putting my
feet down strongly but without haste that they might have noticed, to be inside and know
that they were looking at me; I was hiding very far inside but I could hear them and see
them still from one corner of my eye. I wished they were all lying there dead on the
ground. (18)
24

As if to explain why she began to hide so far inside herself, she recalls another time that the
Harris boys were taunting her, and significantly, this memory reveals a time when Merricat
actually tries to appeal to Mrs. Harris as a neighbor, as a fellow human being:
Once when I was going past, the Harris boys’ mother came out onto the porch, perhaps to
see what they were all yelling so about. She stood there for a minute watching and
listening and I stopped and looked at her, looking into her flat dull eyes and knowing I
must not speak to her and knowing I would. “Can’t you make them stop?” I asked her
that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever
run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love. “Can’t you
make them stop?”
“Kids,” she said, not changing her voice or her look or her air of dull enjoyment,
“don’t call the lady names.”
“Yes, ma,” one of the boys said soberly.

23
Merricat echoes The Road’s narrator when commenting on the ritual Tin-Tin: “I wondered if their parents
taught them, Jim Donell and Dunham and dirty Harris leading regular drills of their children, teaching them with
loving care, making sure they pitched their voices right; how else could so many children learn so thoroughly?”
(16).
24
This is strange if Merricat is usually exterior and Constance is the one hiding; however, this is sort of the
point—whether they are sisters or doubles, Merricat and Constance resist traditional binaries, including exterior v.
interior.
209
“Don’t go near no fence. Don’t call no lady names.” And I walked on, while they
shrieked and shouted and the woman stood on the porch and laughed. (16–17)
25

Here, Merricat illustrates an act of betrayal only hinted at earlier, and when her memory merges
into the present, it gives way to her most violent fantasy yet—“Their throats will burn when the
words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires” (17).
Despite Jim Donell’s ominous sendoff, “You just say the word, Miss Mary Katherine,
and we’ll all come out and help you pack” (15), or the final farewell from the Harris boys and
their friends, “Goodbye Merricat . . . don’t hurry back” (17), Merricat does not indicate that this
particular shopping trip is any more terrible than usual. We only understand why she begins the
narrative on this Friday in late April once she is back inside the safety of the Blackwood property
and on her familiar path through the wooded area that leads to her house.
26
As Merricat comes
around the turn, she sees that Constance has made it to the end of the garden, and
she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her.
“Merricat,” she said, smiling at me, “look how far I came today.”
“It’s too far,” I said. “First thing I know you’ll be following me into the village.”
“I might at that,” she said.
Even though I knew she was teasing me I was chilled, but I laughed. “You wouldn’t
like it much,” I told her. (19, emphasis added)

It turns out, then, that the threat of the outside world has already taken root, and in Constance,
whom Merricat describes as “the most precious person in my world, always” (20).

25
This memory also recalls the scene in “The Daemon Lover” when the young boy makes a ruckus on the street
and shouts “‘She’s got something on the poor guy,’ and the woman rocking the baby laughed” (27). Of course, these
narratives are already connected through the name Harris.
26
The path and the Blackwood land is familiar to Merricat alone. She explains that “The path was dark, because
once our father had had given up any idea of putting his land to profitable use he had let the trees and bushes and
small flowers grow as they chose, and except for one great meadow and the gardens our land was heavily wooded,
and no one knew its secret ways but me. When I went along the path, going easily now because I was home, I knew
each step and every turn. Constance could put names to all the growing things, but I was content to know them by
their way and place of growing, and their unfailing offers of refuge. The only prints on the path were my own, going
in and out to the village” (19). Therefore, although Merricat follows figuratively in her father’s footsteps and does
not cultivate the land for monetary profit—nor do she and her sister rent the property to anyone in the village to
farm—her literal footprints reveal that she makes use of the land in another way. Her familiarity and knowledge of
the uncultivated land is a form of power, and later, she uses this knowledge strategically when she and Constance
need to escape from the threatening villagers and she leads Constance through the darkness to her secret hiding
place in the woods (109–10).
210
But we know that even Constance is not completely cut off from the outside world; in
fact, it is on Friday afternoons that Mrs. Helen Clarke visits for tea. Although Mrs. Clarke knows
better than to bring a stranger without first checking with Merricat, when Merricat sees that it is
only Mrs. Wright—only an almost-stranger—Constance assures her sister that she will be fine,
and adds that the frightened Mrs. Wright is “Kind of a weak first step” (25). Merricat’s anxiety
comes to a head a little while later, when the foursome are sitting down to tea in Mrs.
Blackwood’s prized drawing room, and Mrs. Clarke turns to Constance and announces that she
would like to give her some friendly advice. Merricat recalls,
I must have known what she was going to say, because I was chilled; all this day had
been building up to what Helen Clarke was going to say right now. I sat low in my chair
and looked hard at Constance, wanting her to get up and run away, wanting her not to
hear what was just about to be said, but Helen Clarke went on, “It’s spring, you’re young,
you’re lovely, you have a right to be happy. Come back into the world.”
Once, even a month ago when it was still winter, words like that would have made
Constance draw back and run away; now, I saw that she was listening and smiling,
although she shook her head. (27, emphasis added)

Merricat escapes to the kitchen; she cannot breathe, she is tied with wire, and her head is huge
and going to explode. Merricat realizes that this had been the third time in one day that the
subject had been touched, and three times makes it real—“Constance had looked as though
suddenly, after all this time of refusing and denying, she had come to see that it might be
possible, after all, to go outside” (27).
When Merricat returns to the drawing room, Constance is mid-question, “—do with Mary
Katherine?”, which confirms that Mrs. Clarke is only addressing Constance when she implores,
211
“Come back into the world.”
27
While it is no great surprise that Merricat, who appears to reject
any image of femininity imposed externally, is not considered a viable commodity on the market
of sexual exchange (Irigaray 84), the threat that Constance’s reemergence poses for Merricat
cannot be overstated, especially if we consider that Mrs. Clarke must have denied Merricat’s
value—even Merricat’s value to Constance, Mrs. Clarke’s supposedly close friend—six years
earlier when the twelve-year-old was sent to an orphanage. In her proposal to reintroduce
Constance to the patriarchal order, Mrs. Clarke does not simply pose a threat to the sisters’
female self-sufficiency—but she also presents Constance with a choice that would undermine the
sisters’ loving relationship (Carpenter 35).
To Mrs. Clarke’s horror, when Uncle Julian joins them in the drawing room, the
frightened-but-curious Mrs. Wright engages him on the Blackwood poisoning—it is his favorite
subject and the subject of the book he writes when he feels well enough. Nevertheless, Mrs.
Clarke makes a few comments that divulge a general disapproval of how the Blackwoods treated
their daughters. Perhaps the most surprising moment is when Julian’s description of Merricat
prompts Constance to remind Mrs. Clarke of what a wicked child Merricat had been, Mrs. Clarke
declares, “An unhealthy environment . . . A child should be punished for wrongdoing, but she

27
This is also confirmed a little later in the conversation, after Merricat finally chimes in and humorously
suggests that to celebrate Constance’s reentrance into the world, they should invite some of the good people from
the village over to the house. Mrs. Clarke’s reaction is very telling; she is not only startled when Merricat speaks,
but she also dismisses Merricat’s concerns, and Merricat along with them, by claiming that the hostility the younger
sister feels from the villagers is nine-tenths in her imagination—“on your side it’s just been exaggerated out of all
proportion”—and that if Merricat would go halfway to be friendly, there would never be a word spoken against her
(29).
Of course, the reader is not inclined to give much credence to Mrs. Clarke’s opinions by now. In the moments
before Merricat interjects with her preposterous proposal of hosting the villagers, she had been entertaining herself
(and the reader) as she contemplates their weekly visitor: “Helen Clarke was eating sandwiches, reaching down past
Constance to take one after another. She wouldn’t behave like this anywhere else . . . She never cares what
Constance thinks or I think of her manners; she only supposes we are so very glad to see her. . . . I wondered if
Helen Clarke saved particular costumes for her visits to our house. ‘This,’ I could imagine her saying, turning out
her closet, ‘no sense in throwing this away, I can keep it for visiting dear Constance.’ I began dressing Helen Clarke
in my mind, putting her in a bathing suit on a snow bank, setting her high in the hard branches of a tree in a dress of
flimsy pink ruffles that caught and pulled and tore; she was tangled in the tree and screaming and I almost laughed”
(29).
212
should be made to feel that she is still loved.” However, Mrs. Clarke’s conviction wavers
quickly, “‘I would never have tolerated the child’s wildness. And now we really must . . .’ She
began to put on her gloves again” (34–35).
Mrs. Wright, however, seems completely unable to align Constance, the pretty and
charming young girl before her, with Constance, the homicidal maniac presented in the media
(38), which is why Mrs. Wright is such a perfect stand-in for any reader who is reluctant to
sympathize with a murderer. This is also why it is only appropriate that Merricat uses the
conversation between Mrs. Wright and Uncle Julian to inform the reader of the sensational crime
that took place six years ago without disclosing her involvement. While the reader eventually
discovers that the poisoning was the result of an unspoken collusion between the sisters, Merricat
never explicitly answers the great, unanswered question of why, as Mrs. Wright puts it (38).
What we do get from Julian is a generally unappealing portrait of a supposedly large and happy
family that was not overblessed with patience, and in which “husband and wife, brother and
sister, did not always see eye to eye” (33).
28
Julian depicts Mr. Blackwood as authoritative,
prideful, and vain (33); Mrs. Blackwood, as a delicate woman, “born for tragedy, perhaps,
although inclined to be a little silly” (34), and, apparently, not inclined to traditionally feminine
activities such as cooking and cleaning (36); and Thomas, the ten-year-old son who possessed
many of his father’s more forceful traits of character (34). But most important, Julian gives the
strong impression that Constance was overworked from a young age and fulfilled the duties of
wife and mother on Mrs. Blackwood’s behalf—at one point, Mrs. Wright states strongly: “She
[Constance] should not have been doing the cooking” (35). And, when Julian explains to Mrs.

28
There are two sets of husband and wife (John/Lucy and Julian/Dorothy), and two combinations brother and
sister (Thomas/Constance and Thomas/Merricat)—even more if we count the relationships between John and Julian
and their sisters-in-laws. The only relationship that Julian confirms as a strong one is between sister and sister—
Constance and Merricat.
213
Wright why Merricat was not present, he actually repeats the customary disregard that the
Blackwoods reserved for their second daughter and middle-child: “A great child of twelve, sent
to bed without her supper. But she need not concern us” (34, emphasis added).
On Saturday, Merricat continues to use Uncle Julian as a mouthpiece to tell the reader
about the Blackwood family by recording his rambling reflections while he lays in the afternoon
sun as Constance works in the garden. Julian is interested in recounting the last day, and he often
returns to reflect on the idea that it was the last day for his wife, his sister-in-law, and his brother,
and wonders whether having knowledge of this might have affected their choices, or, he wonders
if perhaps anyone did have an inkling that their end might be near (46–50)—Merricat echoes this
hypothetical mode at the start of the narrative (and throughout) when referring to the library
books. For instance, he remembers John Blackwood came downstairs whistling, “never caring of
course if he woke people with his noise and his whistling,” and wonders if he might have been
quieter if he knew it was his last morning on earth. Julian wonders if his wife lingered in bed this
morning instead of helping Constance in the kitchen because “perhaps she had a premonition and
wanted to take her earthly rest while she could” (47).
29
Julian adds to the portrait of Mr.
Blackwood as a self-centered and intimidating man with little grace; he would watch and
sometimes remark on the amount of food that Julian and Dorothy would eat, never letting them
forget whose house they lived in.
But when Julian recalls that he always felt that his brother believed Dorothy should do
more around the house, one senses that Julian agrees, though not necessarily for the same
reasons as his brother. Rather, Julian indicates a tacit understanding that Constance was given
too much work and responsibility. In his memory of the last day, which was an ordinary day

29
When Julian asks Constance what tune his brother used to whistle, “and always off-key,” Constance hummed
softly and Merricat shivers (47).
214
until it was no longer, Constance cooked breakfast, did the dishes, weeded in the vegetable
garden while the adults relaxed in the garden and Thomas climbed the chestnut tree and pestered
them, and then Constance quickly prepared rarebit for lunch (49). What is equally disheartening
is that Julian’s memories do not include Merricat; she does not appear to have been present at the
breakfast table, in the garden, or at lunch, and suddenly it becomes clear why Merricat does not
tell us about the last day herself.
Of course, there is another reason that Merricat narrates Julian’s reflections—she is
preparing us for Cousin Charles. She introduces the chapter by announcing
A change was coming, and nobody knew it but me. Constance suspected; I noticed that
she stood occasionally in her garden and looked not down at the plants she was tending,
and not back at our house, but outward, toward the trees which hid the fence, and
sometimes she looked long and curiously down the length of the driveway, as though
wondering how it would feel to walk along it to the gates. I watched her. (57)

The difference between then and now is that six years earlier, Merricat and Constance both
wanted the change; in each their own way, the two daughters had been mistreated stepchildren in
Mr. Blackwood’s castle, and together, they won their freedom. This time, however, they are on
different pages, so to speak. And the following day, when Cousin Charles arrives at the
Blackwood’s front door for a surprise visit and Constance invites him in, the older sister
(re)opens a sliding door onto their alternative narrative, which, had it been the younger sister’s
choice, would have remained sealed shut forever.
30
Later that night, when Merricat is lying in the
woods near the creek with Jonas and she tells herself “There was no cousin, no Charles
Blackwood, no intruder inside. It was because the book had fallen from the tree; I had neglected
to replace it at once and our wall of safety had cracked. Tomorrow I would find some powerful
thing and nail it to the tree” (58).

30
Merricat highlights the textual aspect of the change when she reports that on Monday morning, Julian says:
“Perhaps today is a good day to begin a new chapter. Constance?” “Yes, Uncle Julian?” “Do you think I should
begin chapter forty-four today?” (60). Hattenhauer points out that with this comment, “Jackson even inscribes
herself in Julian’s works. . . . When Jackson was writing this novel, she was 44” (182).
215
Merricat wakes up believing she dreamed Charles away; unfortunately, she arrives home
to discover this is not the case:
“Cousin Charles is still asleep,” she said, and the day fell apart around me. I saw Jonas in
the doorway and Constance by the stove but they had no color. I could not breathe, I was
tied around tight, everything was cold.
“He was a ghost,” I said.
Constance laughed, and it was a sound very far away. “Then a ghost is sleeping in
Father’s bed,” she said. “And ate a very hearty dinner while you were gone,” she said.

Merricat believes that Charles is the ghost—and later the demon-ghost—of her father, and a
ghost that must be driven away (61). On the one hand, Merricat’s depiction of Charles as the
Gothic return is ironic, considering he represents rationality, order, and progress; on the other
hand, her fear of Charles’s Gothic sameness earnestly expresses the necessity of expelling
Charles. Unlike Constance, Merricat does not believe that Charles could be anything other than
an embodiment of John Blackwood; he looks and talks like her father, and he makes his
intentions to reinstate the Blackwood patriarchy known almost immediately.
When he comes down to breakfast that morning and meets Julian for the first time, he
admits to Julian that his father, Arthur Blackwood, died and left no money (63). Then, as he eats
the pancakes that Constance has just served him, Julian tells Charles that he is eager to hear his
story about his family and their decision to sever from the family during Constance’s trial but
Charles says there is no point in keeping those memories alive. When Julian begs to differ,
Charles takes a patronizing tone and says, “I refuse to discuss it any further” (66). Moments
later, Charles complains to Jonas that “Cousin Mary doesn’t like me,” as if Merricat was a child,
and when she does not play along, he says to the cat “Oh well . . . Constance likes me, and I
guess that’s all that matters” (67). By that afternoon, Charles threatens Merricat when he tells
Jonas “I wonder if Cousin Mary knows how I get even with people who don’t like me?” (70),
and when Constance enters the room wheeling Uncle Julian in his wheelchair, Charles
216
immediately switches into a gentlemen. Later that evening, he is advising Constance against
keeping money in the house (72).
By Tuesday, the foundation of Merricat’s world begins to unravel, which is simply to say
that her weekly pattern has been disrupted. When Charles goes to the village instead of Merricat,
she hangs her father’s gold watch chain high on the tree in the place of her father’s notebook,
(77), which suggests that it is urgent she prevent Charles from resubmitting the Blackwood
house to teleological time and capitalist exchange. Unless Merricat hopes to make him more
angry, which certainly is a possibility, her plan backfires. An incensed Charles declares that
“Sensible people don’t go around nailing this kind of valuable thing to trees” (77), and he not
only starts wearing the watch and chain, but within a few days, he gets the watch to work again
(86).
The temporal collision is represented at the level of narration. Chapter Six begins on
Tuesday, but it breaks with the previous chapters in which a chapter is concerned with a single
day—two chapters are devoted to Friday, perhaps because Friday includes a shopping trip and a
visit from Mrs. Clarke—and midway through, Merricat’s narrative jumps to Wednesday (78). He
has only been at the house for three days, but Merricat speaks as if it has been longer; she says
“He walked into the village each afternoon and brought back newspapers which he left lying
everywhere” (78, emphasis added). Still, Merricat does not resort to desperate measures; quite to
the contrary, she actually decides to simply ask Charles politely to go away. This plan also
backfires and Charles intimates that it will be Merricat who will go away, “come about a month
from now, I wonder who will still be here? You . . . or me?” (80). Merricat runs inside and
straight to her father’s room and hammers the mirror over the dresser with a shoe (80), which is
not only a first step in Merricat’s emerging plan to make her father’s room unrecognizable to
217
Charles (87), but also seems to be directly related to her father’s vanity—just the day before
Uncle Julian had recalled that John Blackwood was a man very fond of his person, “Given to
adoring himself, and not overly clean” (78)—as if to suggest that without his “magic mirror,” the
demon-ghost will no longer desire to stay.
31

In the meantime, a distance is growing between Constance and Merricat. Charles has
managed to make Constance see their living situation through his eyes, and she begins to believe
she has not been doing her duty (79). When Constance begins to explain what this means, “I’ve
been hiding here,” Merricat is immediately (and correctly) suspicious of where these ideas are
coming from and explains that Constance speaks slowly, “as though she were not at all sure of
the correct order of the words” (79). A little later, Constance says “I think . . . that we are going
to have to forbid your wandering. It’s time you quieted down a little” (81). This time, Merricat
calls her sister out:
“Does we mean you and Charles?”
“Merricat.” Constance turned toward me, sitting back against her feet and folding
her hands before her. “I never realized until lately how wrong I was to let you and Uncle
Julian hide here with me. We should have faced the world and tried to live normal lives;
Uncle Julian should have been in a hospital all these years, with good care and nurses to
watch him. We should have been living like other people. You should . . .” She stopped,
and waved her hands helplessly. “You should have boy friends,” she said finally, and
then began to laugh because she sounded funny even to herself.
“I have Jonas,” I said, and we both laughed and Uncle Julian woke up suddenly and
laughed a thin old cackle.
“You are the silliest person I ever saw,” I told Constance, and went off to look for
Jonas. (82)

While this conversation ends well, Merricat runs into Charles on his way back from the village
carrying a newspaper and a bottle of wine for his dinner. Now he is wearing her father’s scarf,

31
After this, there is another jump in the narration, and the ambiguous cue—“I followed Charles one afternoon
when he went to the village”—makes it impossible to say for certain how much time has elapsed. Although when
Merricat continues to tell the reader that after Charles buys a newspaper at Stella’s, she sees him sit down on the
benches with the other men (81), it may seem as if Charles has been there for a long time, we must keep in mind
how quickly Charles learns to occupy Mr. Blackwood’s former position. My guess is that Merricat spies at some
point over the course of one week because when Merricat discovers that Charles has the watch working again at the
start of Chapter Seven, which is a Thursday, she says he had kept it going for two to three days (86).
218
which she “had used to tie shut the gate because Charles had a key” (82). At this point, it seems
that Merricat is relying on her “magical” safeguards to make Constance see Charles for who is
and what he represents. However, Merricat overhears Charles when he reaches the kitchen,
complaining that he could have worn the scarf, “It’s an expensive thing, and I like the colors”
(82). Constance merely replies, “It belonged to Father,” which reminds Charles
“One of these days I’d like to look over the rest of his clothes.” He was quiet for a
minute; I thought he was probably sitting down on my bench. Then he went on, very
lightly. “Also,” he said, “while I’m here, I ought to go over your father’s papers. There
might be something important.” (82)

Julian speaks first, “Not my papers . . . . That young man is not to put a finger on my papers”
(82).
32

For a second time, then, Merricat must interrupt the myth of an operative community; she
must somehow adapt their nontraditional fairy tale narrative in order to prevent it from being
subsumed into the traditional discourse that Charles signifies. However, this time Merricat must
do it on her own because Constance refuses to accept that marrying Charles necessarily means
reinstating the old phallocratic order—an order that Charles makes crystal clear to Merricat will
have no place for weird and rebellious teenagers and the old and infirmed. But this is not the
only reason why Merricat needs to find a different strategy; Merricat knows that she cannot
resort to the same kind of violence; she understands that the love she has for her sister comes
before all else. Here, Merricat reveals what it means to be a sisterly sister, and although hers is

32
Despite his impaired cognition, Julian senses almost as quickly as Merricat that Charles is up to no good. He
tells Constance he is dishonest like his brothers, and a bastard—metaphorically speaking, he assures her (83–84). In
fact, because Julian’s confusion of people is often very telling, particularly when it comes to his confusion of his
brother John and his nephew Charles, during dinner on Monday night, the day after Charles arrives, Julian hints at
the possibility that the reason he was financially dependent on John is because his brother tricked him into a bad
investment. It is while Constance and Charles are deciding that he should go to the village the following day instead
of Merricat, and Charles discovers that Constance keeps her father’s money in a safe in the house, which he thinks
unwise. At this point, Julian interjects—“I assure you, sire . . . I made a point of examining the books thoroughly
before committing myself. I cannot have been deceived”—which is certainly random but seems less so when we
consider the through line of the conversation, perfectly expressed by Charles in the very next sentence: “‘So I’m
taking little Cousin Mary’s job away from her,’ Charles said, looking at me again. ‘You’ll have to find something
else for her to do, Connie’” (72).
219
most certainly a preferential neighbor-love, she nonetheless exemplifies what it means to be a
neighbor: “I could not allow myself to be angry, and particularly angry with Constance, but I
wished Charles dead. Constance needed guarding more than ever before and if I became angry,
and looked aside she might very well be lost” (79, emphasis added).
As opposed to Constance, Merricat wants the demon-ghost to feel lost, which is why she
alters his room on a Thursday, her most powerful day—the right day to settle with Charles
(86).
33
The fact that Merricat begins Chapter Seven with this statement reveals that she is
struggling to hold onto her world; while there is no way to confirm that the narrative has only
skipped a week, it is significant that Merricat strives to maintain some semblance of the routine
that structures her time, and asserts this structure when she jams the machinery of father’s watch
before she renders her father’s room unrecognizable (86). When Charles confronts Merricat for
vandalizing his room, she refuses to give a reason because “anything I said to him might perhaps
help him to get back his thin grasp on our house” (91). But when Charles looks to Constance and
asks, disbelievingly, “Aren’t you even going to punish her?”, he triggers Merricat’s rage—
“Punish me?” I was standing then, shivering against the door frame. “Punish me? You mean to
send me to bed without my dinner?”—it becomes clear that something more must be done to get
rid of him and later that night, when Constance sends her sister upstairs to wash up before
joining them at the dining-room table, Merricat goes into her father’s room and sees that Charles
left his pipe burning. Merricat tells us “I had known all day that I would find something here; I

33
Interestingly, Thursdays had been her most powerful day because she would go to the attic to dress in their
clothes, and this is the only one of her routines she never allows the reader access. At this point, one might presume
she has also stopped many of her routines, including checking the safeguards that protect the house. After all, at the
start of Chapter Seven, Charles has mysteriously uncovered the box of silver coins that Merricat had buried near the
creek, which leads Merricat to think that “perhaps Charles and money found each other no matter how far apart they
were, or perhaps Charles was engaged in systematically digging up every inch of our land. ‘This is terrible,’ he was
shouting, ‘terrible; she has no right’” (88).
220
brushed the saucer and the pipe off the table into the wastebasket and they fell softly onto the
newspapers he had brought into the house” (99).
34

Both Hattenhauer (178), and Carpenter (35), suggest that Merricat does not understand
what she is doing when she brushes the pipe into the wastebasket because Merricat immediately
says “I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and
yellow and orange, and the other saw shades of blue and grey and green” (99). But simply put,
there is no doubt Merricat is fully cognizant of what she has done; Merricat prefaces the arson
with a brief backstory and the saucers, which “were pink, with gold leaves around the rim; they
were from a set older than I remembered” (99). She says that Constance took them from a pantry
shelf, where they belong, and gave them to Charles to use as ashtrays, and that he then scattered
them all around the house. As soon as she joins them at the dinner table—and before anyone
notices the smoke—Merricat asks Constance “Will you make me a cake with pink frosting? . . .
With little gold leaves around the edge? Jonas and I are going to have a party” (100).
When Merricat sets fire to the house, she sacrifices almost everything familiar in her
universe, including Uncle Julian, whom she and Constance leave behind in the back of the house
when the firefighters rush in through the front door. Julian is only discovered once Dr. Levy and
Jim Clarke—who, as a duo are reminiscent of Mr. Perlman and Mr. Merriam in The Road—run
into the house to break up the village vandals from letting loose any more pent-up anger and

34
Constance tells Merricat a second time to go upstairs—“Run along, Merricat . . . your dinner will be cold”—
Merricat interprets this for the reader, “She knew I would not eat dinner sitting at that table and she would bring me
my dinner in the kitchen afterwards, but I thought that she did not want to remind Charles of that and so give him
one more thing to think about. I smiled at her and went in the hall” (98). I think that Merricat is interpreting this for
the reader in the same coded way she talks about the fire; in other words, I think this is the signal Merricat has been
waiting for from Constance—a signal that says Constance understands now that Charles is (like) Mr. Blackwood.
Particularly because when Merricat, who had recently wondered when her sister would start wearing her mother’s
pearls, first walks into the dining room, she sees that Constance is in pink with her hair combed back nicely (97),
and sadly, she tucked a napkin under Julian’s chin (98). Then she compares Charles to her father as she goes
upstairs: “There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while
to clean them out” (98).
221
resentment on Blackwood property. While the whole scene is violent and threatening,
particularly when a group outside surround Merricat and Constance and chant the nursery rhyme,
as soon as Jim Clarke announces that Julian Blackwood is dead, everyone backs off and quietly
goes home. Not that this suddenly undoes all of the destruction, but it makes the villagers more
sympathetic than one might perhaps expect from Jackson (106–69).
The next morning, the sisters return from Merricat’s strategic hiding place near the creek
to survey the damage and Merricat self-consciously engages with sideshadowing and her fairy
tale revision when she says, “I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly
through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in
time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale” (114). But this radical revision—the
transformation of the stately Blackwood home into the inhospitable ruins of a Gothic castle—is
the only way Merricat could have expelled the threat of patriarchal control, and thus maintain
any control of her narrative. Of course, this renders the castle practically inhabitable; they have
no clothes, no beds, and no roof over their head,
I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, wondering where our house had gone, the
walls and the floors and the beds and the boxes of things in the attic; our father’s watch
was burned away, and our mother’s tortoise-shell dressing set. I could feel a breath of
air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our
house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky. (120)

Although Constance has her doubts, Merricat thinks “We were going to be very happy . .
. . There were a great many things to do, and a whole new pattern of days to arrange” (125).
They clean the kitchen, find new landmarks in the house (145), and Merricat builds barricades
along the sides of it and covers all of the windows. But, and this is significant, since the fire and
for the first time in years, the Blackwood land is open to the public—the men bring the food
baskets, and “the strangers” come to see the house, enticed by local “tall tales” (141).
222
Speaking of tall tales, let’s return to the strange convergences between We Have Always
Lived in the Castle and “The Man in the Woods,” which Jackson must have written around the
same period. The novel is in direct dialogue with the short story, and for the most part, the
conclusion opens onto an alternative history. For instance, Constance plants a yellow rose bush
in memory of Julian, and unlike Mr. Oakes, she has no trouble at all (136–37). Merricat wishes
there was a fireplace in their kitchen on the moon, but then she decides that there has been
enough fire (126), and therefore no hearth. The sisters will not wear uniforms: when Merricat
decides against sharing Julian’s two suits and his pajamas with Constance, and to wear a
tablecloth instead, she chooses red and white check, not green, and a gold tasseled belt from the
drawing room curtain—no woven grass here. Merricat writes,
Constance was sad at first, and turned away sadly when she saw me, and scrubbed
furiously at the sink to get my brown dress clean, but I liked my robe, and danced in it,
and before long she smiled again and then laughed at me.
“Robinson Crusoe dressed in the skins of animals,” I told her. “He had no gay cloths
with a gold belt.” “I must say you never looked so bright before.”
“You will be wearing the skins of Uncle Julian; I prefer my tablecloth.” (137)

Furthermore, whether or not Mr. Blackwood’s study with the walls of books still stands, the
sisters have “valuable records” of their own—the cellar full of jars and jars of inedible, but
lovingly prepared food, a poem by the Blackwood women (42)—and one which they can
continue.
Merricat and Constance’s relationship stands apart not only from Aunt Cissy and Phyllis,
but from all the relationships among women in Jackson’s work included in this study. The sisters
communicate and exchange proofs of love (Irigaray, Ethics 103); Merricat refuses to become
angry, and look aside, because to do so, might mean to lose Constance (79). Being together, they
have been interrupting the myth of community all along, and Merricat’s highly intertextual
223
(dialogic) narrative is still doing the work of unworking. Even the concluding passage playfully
marks its own interruption,
“Poor strangers,” I said. “They have so much to be afraid of.”
“Well,” Constance said. “I am afraid of spiders.”
“Jonas and I will see to it that no spider ever comes near you.
Oh, Constance,” I said, “we are so happy.” (146)
35

And yet, although the sisters interrupt the violent tradition that still envelops the characters at the
end of “The Man in the Woods,” Jackson uses sideshadowing in We Have Always Lived in the
Castle to remind us that one is never really out of the woods—the old myth can always be
renewed (Nancy, The Inoperative Community 59)—and she does this by situating the potential
stage of myth within the space of the fairy tale.
Somewhere within walking distance of the Blackwood home stands an abandoned
summerhouse that Merricat’s father built, and that her mother quite seriously asked to have
burned down. Mr. Blackwood’s plan had been to redirect the creek that runs through his vast
estate and construct a tiny waterfall near the new house, but it never came to fruition because, as
Merricat recalls, “something had gotten into the wood and stone and paint when the
summerhouse was built and made it bad. Our mother had once seen a rat in the doorway looking
in and nothing after that could persuade her there again, and where our mother did not go, no one
else went” (94–95). There is no mention of the summerhouse either before or after Merricat
visits it at the end of Chapter Seven, which is nearly three quarters of the way through Castle. By
this point in the novel, the reader has learned enough about Merricat’s parents to be unsurprised
by Mr. Blackwood’s extravagance and Mrs. Blackwood’s snobbery; however, the story of the

35
Merricat’s narrative exemplifies the feminine “style” or “writing” that Irigaray details in This Sex Which is
Not One (1977)—a discourse in which “linear reading is no longer possible: that is, the retroactive impact of the end
of each word, utterance, or sentence upon its beginning must be taken into consideration in order to undo the power
of its teleological effect, including its deferred action” (80).
224
mysteriously bad summerhouse is nonetheless striking, especially in light of “The Man in the
Woods.”
36
Here is Merricat’s description of the house:
I had never buried anything around here. The ground was black and wet and nothing
buried would have been quite comfortable. The trees pressed too closely against the
sides of the summerhouse, and breathed heavily on its roof, and the poor flowers planted
here once had either died or grown into huge tasteless wild things. (95)

What is this eerily familiar house doing on the Blackwood Farm, within the vicinity of
the sisters’ castle? Whether we call it the summerhouse or the house in the woods, it seems to
serve as a memorial of the paternalistic tradition that Merricat and Constance subvert—a
tradition sideshadowing the sisters as they endeavor to turn their dilapidated castle into a home
and arrange “a whole new pattern of days” (125). But though the house stands at the end of a
forest path, waiting, perhaps, for a Mr. Oakes or a Mr. Blackwood to arrive and resume the
tradition, for now at least, there is no one there to invite them in. One can still hear the echo of
Constance saying “No. Never again” (179).

“The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangement that mankind made to shake off the nightmare
which the myth had placed upon its chest.”

–Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

36
Critics usually mention the summerhouse because it is the site of Merricat’s fantasy scene in which the
eighteen-year-old imagines she is at a Blackwood family dinner, sitting in her rightful and proper place at the
dining-room table, where she listens to her parents’ shower Mary Katherine, their most beloved child, with praises
(95–96). In my opinion, the fantasy does not really reveal anything more than what we already know about the
possible (sexual) abuse or neglect that Merricat experienced. It does, however, reveal the distance between the
fantasy she used to play out in her mind and the fantastical life that Charles’s is threatening to destroy. If we learn
anything about Merricat’s childhood experience from this scene, it is through Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood’s
abandonment of the house—as if it were a “bad seed.” Furthermore, the house is simply superfluous. Earlier in the
novel, Merricat explains that their year-round home was actually intended as a summer home—her father only put in
a heating system when the family had no other place to move to in the winter (23). And since the Blackwoods never
have guests, even if Mr. Blackwood had built a lake and done everything else within his power to have nature
accommodate his desire, there is simply no point in having a summerhouse in the same New England zip code as the
year-round house, which again, was originally a summerhouse.

225
Epilogue: Of Chalk Lines
This project begins with the two sisters rivaling in unsisterliness in their single room
bisected by a chalk line; and it ends with two sisters who would rather burn down their house
than allow a chalk line to come between them. Therefore, as an epilogue, I would like to take a
closer look at the chalk line, or the unexpected through line of this dissertation, in relation to
Derrida’s key writings on hospitality and ethics, Of Hospitality and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
which were written within one year of each other and published for the first time in 1997. I want
to consider what the Gothic neighbor plot might have to say about the paradoxical law of
hospitality, or “the radical heterogeneity, but also indissociability” between absolute or
unconditional hospitality, which Derrida associates with Levinasian ethics, and conditional
hospitality, or concrete rights or laws that “answer to the new injunctions of unprecedented
historical situations, that do indeed correspond to them, by changing the laws” (147). For a chalk
line is a condition of hospitality; it is a limit that one sets on the absolute law or desire for
hospitality “in order to protect or claim to protect one’s own hospitality, the own home that
makes possible one’s own hospitality” (53, emphasis added). Even if one draws the chalk line in
good faith, in order to safeguard the very possibility of hospitality, there is no hospitality, in the
classic sense, without sovereignty over one’s self and one’s home—a sovereignty that “can only
be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence”—and thus the
very threshold of the right to hospitality involves a certain injustice and even a certain perjury
(55).
Hospitality goes hand in hand with ethical neighbor praxis; it can mean both the receiving
of a guest into one’s home and the welcoming of the other in the face-to-face encounter. But as
we have seen time and again, a chalk line often coincides with the practices of an exclusionary

226
community, and yet, a line must be drawn somewhere. For, unconditional hospitality to all
others, which always puts the subjectivity of the subject in question—in Levinasian ethics,
being-for-other in hospitality is the redefinition of the subjectivity of the subject (Adieu 53)—is
“a thinking of a certain impossibility” (Robbins xv).
1
And while the thinking of the
unconditional is necessary to the very possibility of hospitality, there is still the question of ethics
in the here and now.
2
If the monad has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at-home (61),
and we take the monad to refer to the self or the home, then it seems the only way to be
hospitable and remain at-home, would be to acknowledge a limit to those I invite in.
3

With this in mind, we might say that the question at the heart of a modern ethics of
neighborliness is whether or not there is any way to reconcile conditional hospitality with an
ethics that nonetheless seeks to interrupt sovereign subjectivity and a non-allergic relationship to
alterity. Can one draw a chalk line responsibly? Before we could even begin to answer this, we
should ask what it might mean to draw one irresponsibly, or unjustly, which is why we will turn
our attention briefly to the paternalistic tradition of hospitality that appears to place the law of
hospitality above a certain ethics (Derrida, Of Hospitality 149–51). Derrida exemplifies this
tradition of hospitality with two biblical stories, or situations, in which an all-powerful father is
willing to sacrifice his virginal daughter(s) rather than have his male guests be taken hostage.

1
Jill Robbins writes: “it is on the basis of the thinking of a certain impossibility that the ethical becomes legible
in Levinas” (xv).
2
But to be clear, such conditions are paradoxical to Levinasian ethics, in which responsibility for the other takes
ipseity hostage—“The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone” (Levinas qtd. in
Derrida, Adieu 55).
3
Just before the manuscript of “Lay Morals” ends, mid-sentence, Stevenson sets the perimeters of our ethical
responsibility rather close to home:
Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should be helped the first. There
at least there can be little imposture, for you know their necessities of your own knowledge. And
consider, if all the world did as you did, and according to their means extended help in the circle
of their affections, there would be no more crying want in times of plenty and no more cold,
mechanical charity given with a doubt and received with confusion. Would not this simple rule
make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit? (240)

227
Derrida begins with the story of Lot, who offers hospitality to the two godly messengers
whom he meets at the city gates of Sodom. When the Sodomite men surround Lot’s house and
demand that he send his guests outside so that they can abuse them, “Lot came out to them at the
door and having closed the door behind him said, ‘I beg you, my brothers, do no such wicked
thing. Listen, I have two daughters who are virgins. I am ready to send them out to you, to treat
as it pleases you. But as for the men, do nothing to them, for they have come under the shadow
of my roof’” (19.1–9).
4
Fortunately for Lot’s daughters, God intervenes before their father has an
opportunity to make good on his unthinkable bargain (151); however, the violence suggested by
Lot’s offer to substitute his daughters and thus protect his guests, serves as just a prelude for the
second situation that Derrida introduces—a situation in which the same law of hospitality
involves “a sort of hierarchy of the guests and the hostages” (153).
5

In Judges 19, the Levite from Ephraim and his entourage—his concubine, his servant,
and two donkeys—are journeying from Bethlehem. They stop for the night in the Israelite town
of Gibeah, where they are invited to spend the night in the house of an old man who, like Lot, is

4
Here, and in the following passages from Judges as well, I am quoting from Of Hospitality, and Derrida (or his
translator) cites The Jerusalem Bible.
5
Derrida focuses only on the second part of Judges 19, which is often referred to as the “outrage of Gibeah.”
The first part concerns the man’s journey to Bethlehem to speak tenderly to his concubine who had left him some
four months earlier after she became angry with him and returned to her father’s house. When the Levite first
arrives, the woman’s father is overjoyed, and for three days they eat and drink. On the fourth day, the man rises
early to return to Ephraim with his concubine, but his host entreats him to delay— “Fortify yourself with a bit of
food, and after that you may go.” So they eat and drink, and later, when the Levite prepares to depart, the father-in-
law again urges him to stay, “Why not spend the night and enjoy yourself?” The fifth day begins much the same,
and the father persuades the man to delay; however, although the man accepts his father-in-law’s invitation to fortify
himself, he does not want to stay the night, and so later in the day, they begin their journey back to Ephraim. They
are near Jebus (Jerusalem) when night begins to fall, and the servant suggests they stop in the city of the Jebusites
for the night, but the Levite refuses and declares “We will not turn aside into a city of foreigners, who do not belong
to the people of Israel; but we will continue on to Gibeah.” Therefore, it is this hostile remark about the city of the
Jebusites that brings them to the city of Benjaminites, where they are treated roughly and as if they are foreigners,
though they are not (Judges 19:1–21).

228
himself a foreigner.
6
When a group of men from the city surround the old man’s house and
demand he send the pilgrim outside so they can penetrate him,
the master of the house went out to them and said, “No, my brothers; I implore you, do not
commit this crime. This man has become my guest; do not commit such an infamy. Here is my
daughter; she is a virgin; I will give her to you. Possess her, do what you please with her, but do
not commit such an infamy against this man.” The men would not listen to him. So the Levite took
his concubine and brought her out to them. They had intercourse with her and outraged her all
night till morning: when dawn was breaking they let her go.
At day break the girl came and fell on the threshold of her husband’s host, and she stayed
there till it was full day. In the morning her husband got up and opened the door of the house.
(19:23–26)

Seeing his concubine on the threshold, the Levite callously orders her to get up because they are
leaving, but she gives no answer. The man puts her on the donkey and takes off for Ephraim, and
upon his arrival, “he picked up his knife, took hold of his concubine, and limb by limb cut her
into twelve pieces; then he sent her all through the land of Israel.” He instructs his messengers to
say the following to all the Israelites, “Has any man seen such a thing from the day the Israelites
came out of the land of Egypt, until this very day? Ponder on this, discuss it; then give your
verdict” (19:27–30). All who saw it agreed that never had such a thing been done or been seen
since the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt. It is here that Derrida concludes the seminar
with a bracing set of questions: “Are we the heirs of this tradition of hospitality? Up to what
point? Where should we place the invariant, if it is one, across this logic and these narratives?
They testify without end in our memory” (155).
Are we the heirs to this tradition of hospitality? Stevenson and Jackson’s Gothic
demonstrates the answer is yes; but it also reveals that the laws of hospitality have changed, and
that we must continue to interrogate the paradoxical but necessary relation between conditional
hospitality and unconditional or absolute hospitality in order to create more justice. In We Have
Always Lived in the Castle, we have a somewhat familiar situation: there is a crowd of angry

6
The old man is a native of Ephraim, where the Levite is from. However, there is one major difference between
the two settings is that the second scene takes place in Israelite territory, and emphasizes the moral degradation of
Israel in this period.

229
villagers surrounding a house, two virgin daughters, and an aspiring young despot, but whereas
Charles is looking to reinstate the Blackwood patriarchy, both the villagers and Merricat and
Constance have had, in their own ways, enough. At the end of the novel, the old boundaries have
been revised and an ethics of hospitality takes root in a tradition of hostility; there is a new kind
of communication taking place at the threshold of being-in-common. And what a distance we
have traveled from the two sisters sitting in their hateful silence on either side of a chalk line, as
if the chalk line were set in stone.

230
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science
8.3 (1939): 413–429.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: Norton,
2004.
Ambrosini, Richard and Richard Dury, eds. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006.
Anderson Galleries, Inc. Autograph Letters, Original Manuscripts, Books, Portraits And Curios
From the Library of the Late Robert Louis Stevenson. New York, 1914.
Arata, Stephen. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and
Hyde.” Criticism 37.2 (1995): 233–259.
---. “Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic.” Fielding, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis
Stevenson 52–69.
Atkinson, David. “Marriage and Retribution in ‘James Harris (The Daemon Lover).’”
Folk Music Journal 5.5 (1989): 592–607.
Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine d’. The Fairy Tales of Madame D’Aulnoy. Trans. Annie Macdonnell
and Miss Lee. 1895. Honolulu: UP of the Pacific, 2003.
Baldick, Chris. Introduction. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Baldick. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2009. xi–xxiii.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Balfour, Graham. The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Scribner’s, 1915.
Barr, Donald. “A Talent for Irony.” New York Times Book Review 17 Apr. 1949: 4.
231
Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2002.
Berg, A. Scott. Lindbergh. New York: Berkeley, 1999.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station
Hill Press, 1988.
“Body Mile From Hopewell.” New York Times: 1. 13 May 1932.
Bonikowski, Wyatt. “Only One Antagonist: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in
the Work of Shirley Jackson.” Gothic Studies 15.2 (2013): 66–88.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. 2
nd
ed. London: Routledge, 2014.
Bratcher, James T. “The Grimalkin Story in Baldwin's Beware the Cat.” Notes and Queries 53
(2006): 428–430.
Breit, Harvey. “Talk with Miss Jackson.” New York Times: 1. 26 Jun. 1949
“Briefly Noted: Fiction.” Rev. of The Road Through the Wall. The New Yorker 21 Feb. 1948:
94–97.
Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft.
New York: Penguin, 1996.
Brooks, Joanna. Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Knopf, 1981.
“Career Girl Marries.” Life 29 Nov. 1948: 135–136.
Carpenter, Lynette. “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s
We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Frontiers 8.1 (1984): 32–38.
“Child Stolen In Evening.” New York Times 2 Mar. 1932: 1.
232
“Cissy, n. and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014.
Cleveland, Carol. “Shirley Jackson.” And Then There Were Nine . . . More Women of Mystery.
Ed. Jane S. Bakerman. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,
1985. 199–219.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes For Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Coupe, Laurence. Myth. 2
nd
ed. London: Routledge, 2009.
Critchley, Simon. Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary
French Thought. London: Verso, 1999.
---. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2012.
“Dead reckoning, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
---. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
---. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and
Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79–153.
“Does it Matter that Hero Charles Ramsey has A Criminal Past?” National Public Radio 10 May
2013.
Dooling, Michael C. Clueless in New England: The Unsolved Disappearances of Paula Welden,
Connie Smith, and Katherine Hull. CT: Carrollton Press, 2010.
Duncan, Ian. “Stevenson and Fiction.” Fielding, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis
Stevenson 11–26.
233
Dury, Richard. “Crossing the Bounds of Single Identity: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a Paper in
a French Scientific Journal.” Ambrosini and Dury, Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of
Boundaries 237–251.
---. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Richard Dury. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2004.
Egan, James. “Comic-Satiric-Fantastic-Gothic: Interactive Modes in Shirley Jackson’s
Narratives.” Murphy 34–51.
Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the
Subject. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013.
“Everybody has Telepathic Power, Dr. Carrel Says After Research.” New York Times 18 Sept.
1935: 25.
Fagenblat, Michael. “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics.” Levine and
Brettler, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 1256–1265.
Farnell, Gary. “The Gothic and the Thing.” Gothic Studies 11.1 (2009): 113.
“Father Searches Grounds For Child.” New York Times 2 Mar. 1932: 1–3.
Ferreira, Jamie M. “Kierkegaard and Levinas on Four Elements of the Biblical Love
Commandment.” Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion. Ed. J. Aaron
Simmons and David Wood. Bloomingston: Indiana UP, 2008.
Fielding, Penny, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Fitzgerald, Jacqueline. “A Career and a Life.” Chicago Tribune: 1. May 07 2003.
“Four States Join Hunt.” New York Times 2 Mar. 1932: 1.
Franklin, Ruth. Foreword. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Penguin, 2013. vii–x.
234
Frazer, James George, and Robert Fraser. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton,
1961.
---. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James
Strachey et al. Vol. XIII: 1913–1914. London: Vintage, 2001.
---. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James
Strachey et al. Volume I: 1886–1899. London: Hogarth, 1966.
---. “The Uncanny.” Trans. David Mclintock. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975.
Gelder, Kenneth. “Stevenson and the Covenanters: ‘Black Andie’s Tale Of Tod Lapraik’ and
‘Thrawn Janet.’” Scottish Literary Journal 11 (1984): 56–70.
Gosse, Edmund. Critical Kit-Kats. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1903.
Gottlieb, Rachel. “A Camper Walks Away, Picks Daisies And Vanishes.” Hartford Courant: Jul.
16 2000: A1.
“Grimalkin, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014.
Hall, Joan Wylie. “Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall.” Murphy 23-
33.
---. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Hamilton, Alan. “How Houseproud Wife nearly Put Paid to Jekyll and Hyde.” The Times Oct 25
2000: 10.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: Back Bay, 1969.
235
Hamilton, Geoff and Brian Jones, eds. Encyclopedia of the Environment in American Literature.
Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2013.
Hansen, Harry. “New York Discovers It Has a Spine-Chilling Sensation.” Chicago Daily
Tribune 15 Aug. 1948: G2.
Harman, Claire. Myself & The Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York:
Harper, 2005.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Ethics.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 387–405.
Hartland, Edwin Sidney. English Fairy and Folk Tales. London: W. Scott England:1890.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson's American Gothic. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge,
1998.
Hyman, Laurence Jackson. “This Week in Fiction: Shirley Jackson.” Newyorker.com. The New
Yorker, 21 Apr. 2014.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Preface. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. By Shirley Jackson. Ed. Hyman.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. vii–ix.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell UP, 1993.
---. This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1985.
Jackson, Shirley. Hangsaman. New York: Penguin, 2013.
---. The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, 2005.
---. “The Man in the Woods.” The New Yorker 28 Apr. 2014: 64–69.
236
---. “The Missing Girl.” Just an Ordinary Day. Eds. Lawrence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman
Stewart. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. 339–349.
---. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Penguin, 2013.
---. We have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor and
Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper, 2009.
Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book,
VII. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
Leighton, Alexander. Romances of the Old Town of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1867.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1990.
---. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,
1998.
---. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
UP, 1969.
Levine, Amy-Jill and Marc Z. Brettler. The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2011.
“Lindbergh Home Finished Last Fall.” New York Times 2 Mar. 1932: 3.
Lindlow, John. “Cats and Dogs, Trolls and Devils: At Home in Some Migratory Legend Types”
Western Folklore 69.2 (2010): 163:179.
Lonsdale, Henry. A Sketch of the Life and Writing of Robert Knox the Anatomist. London:
Macmillan, 1870.
237
Maixner, Paul. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1981.
Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.
Berkeley: California UP, 1999.
McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. “Burking the Scottish Body: Robert Louis Stevenson and the
Resurrection Men.” Ambrosini and Dury, Writers of Boundary 133–144.
Mehew, Ernest. “God and the Novelists. 12. Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Expository Times
110.10 (1999): 312–6.
Menikoff, Barry. Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. Columbia: U
of South Carolina P, 2005.
Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–
1960. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
---. “Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr. Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr. Hyde’s
Embodiment.” Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed.
Mighall. New York: Penguin, 2002. 145–161.
---. Introduction. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed.
Mighall. New York: Penguin, 2002. ix–xlii.
Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Murphy, Bernice M, ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, N.C:
McFarland, 2005.
238
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Confronted Community.” Trans. Jason Kemp Winfree. The Obsessions
of George Bataille: Community and Communication Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason
Kemp Winfree. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. 19–30.
---. The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1991.
“Neighbor.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Eds. Barbara Cassin,
Emily Apter, and Jacques. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013.
“Neighbour | neighbor, n. and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press.
“Neighbour | neighbor, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press.
“Neighbourhood | Neighborhood, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Michael D. Coogan. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
New Revised Standard vers.
Norquay, Glenda. Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam’s, 1988.
Parke, Andrea. “Pepper St.” New York Times Book Review 22 Feb. 1948, 26.
Parsons, Coleman O. “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet.’” Studies in Philology
43.3 (1946): 551–571.
Pascal, Richard. “‘Farther than Samarkand’: The Escape Theme in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The
Tooth.’” Studies in Short Fiction 19.2 (1982): 133–139.
“The Private Life of Gwyned Filling.” Life 3 May 1948: 103–114.
Reid, Julia. “Robert Louis Stevenson and the ‘Romance of Anthropology.’” Journal of Victorian
Culture 10:1 (2005): 46–71.
239
“Relation, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Robbins, Jill. Altered
Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Roughead, William, ed. Burke and Hare. Glasgow: William Hodge & Co., 1921.
Richardson, Ruth. “The art of medicine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher.” The
Lancet 385(2015): 412–413.
---. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Trans. David Pellauer.
Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.
---. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Roughead, William, ed. Burke and Hare. Glasgow: William Hodge & Co., 1921.
Schechter, Harold, ed. True Crime: An American Anthology. New York: The Library of
America, 2008.
Scott, Sir Walter. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. London, 1869.
“Servant, 28, Takes Poison.” New York Times 11 June 1932: 1.
“Sissy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014
Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago: U of
Chicago, 2002.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern
Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
“Shoe, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press.
240
Shotwell, Alexis. “‘No proper feeling for her house’: The Relational Formation of White
Womanliness in Shirley Jackson’s Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32.1
(2013): 119–141.
Sinclair, George. Satan’s Invisible World Discovered. Ed. Thomas George Stevenson.
Cambridge: Harvard College Library, Preservation Facsimile, 2003.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Christmas Sermon.” Across the Plains: With Other Memories and
Essays. New York: Cosimo, 2005. 202–212.
---. “A College Magazine.” Memories and Portraits. Lexington: Aeterna, 2010.
---. The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Barry Menikoff. New York:
Modern Library, 2002.
---. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes . . . With Etchings by A. Brunet-Debaines from drawings by S.
Bough . . . and W.E. Lockhart, etc. London, 1888.
---. “The Ethics of Crime.” Works. Vailima Edition. Vol. 24. 274–278.
---. “Introductory.” Works. Vailima Edition. Vol. 24. 167–171.
---. “Lay Morals.” Works. Vailima Edition. Vol. 24. 173–240.
---. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. 8 vols.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1994–5.
---. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols.
New York: Scribner, 1911.
---. An Old Song & Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family. Ed. Roger G. Swearingen.
Hamden: Archon, 1982.
---. “On Morality.” Works. Vailima Edition. Vol. 24. 265–273.
---. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Robert Mighall. New York: Penguin, 2002.
241
---. The Works. Vailima edition. Vol. 24. London: W. Heinemann, 1922.
Swearingen, Roger George. The Early Literary Career Of Robert Louis Stevenson 1850–1881: A
Bibliographical Study (Volumes I and II). Diss. Yale University, 1970. ProQuest, UMI
Dissertations Publishing, 2015.
---. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980.
Symonds, Deborah A. Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, & Moveable Goods: The
Transformation of Edinburgh’s Underworld in the Early Nineteenth Century. Akron: U
of Akron P, 2006.
Teverson, Andrew. Fairy Tale. London: Routledge, 2013.
“Tod, n.4.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014.
Tropp, Martin. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Schopenhauer, and the Power of Will.” The Midwest
Quarterly 32.2 (1991): 141–155.
Turnbull, Olena M. “Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century Theories of Evolution:
Crossing the Boundaries between Ideas and Art. Ambrosini and Dury, Robert Louis
Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries 228–236.
Veeder, William and William Hirsch, eds. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Veeder, William. “The Texts in Question.” Veeder and Hirsch, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After
One Hundred Years 3–13.
Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Warner, Fred B Jr. “Stevenson’s First Scottish Story.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.3 (1969):
335–344.
242
Watt, Francis. R.L.S. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
Wattles, Jeffrey. The Golden Rule. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Widem, Allen M. “Soap Opera, Ham & Hokum.” Hartford Courant 14 Mar. 1948: SM14.
Wilson, John Mackay. Wilson’s Tales of the Borders. Ed. James Tait. London: Gall & Inglis,
1884.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Eds. James Klagge and Alfred
Nordman. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.
Wojcik, Palema Robertson. The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and
Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Greenwald, Naomi (author)

Core Title Neighbor plots: the ethics of strangeness in the modern Gothic

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/30/2015

Defense Date 05/29/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Emmanuel Levinas,ethics,fairy tale,gothic,Gothic fiction,Hospitality,Jacques Derrida,Jean-Luc Nancy,lay morals,legend,Myth,Neighbor,neighor-love,OAI-PMH Harvest,operative community,Robert Louis Stevenson,Shirley Jackson

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Handley, William R. (committee member), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member)

Creator Email ngreenwa@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-614368

Unique identifier UC11301978

Identifier etd-GreenwaldN-3741.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-614368 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-GreenwaldN-3741.pdf

Dmrecord 614368

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Greenwald, Naomi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA