Tea at Trianon: Shirley Jackson and the Unsettled Mystery of Life

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Shirley Jackson and the Unsettled Mystery of Life

From The Bulwark:

It’s difficult to trace exactly which of the writer’s short stories so upset Mrs. White, but by the time she’d lodged her complaint—evidently in 1954, given the date of Jackson’s response—Shirley Jackson was no doubt inured to such feedback. Six years before, The New Yorker published what would turn out to be her most famous, and most infamous, story, “The Lottery.” “The Lottery” has of course become a staple in high school English classes, and is a model of literate horror. No one who has read it is likely to forget one of the story’s final images, when the townspeople are gathering up rocks in preparation to stone to death the woman who “won” this year’s lottery, and Jackson writes “The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.” It’s worth mentioning here, as disturbing as that is on its face, that the woman about to be stoned to death is named Tessie Hutchinson.

The controversy generated from “The Lottery” led to a flood of angry letters, some demanding an explanation, some cancelling their subscription to the New Yorker; by Jackson’s own estimate, over three hundred of them were addressed to her, and forwarded along by the magazine. “Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horrible afraid of being laughed at,” Jackson said in a 1960 lecture collected in her posthumously published book, Come Along with Me. Her correspondents demanded to know where and when in America this ritual took place. These letters came from all over, with one New Yorker assuming it occurred in “the Middle West,” and one Texan imagining the horror must have occurred in “New England, or equally enlightened regions.”

How times have changed. It’s difficult to know why, exactly, readers were so outraged by the story. It’s certainly unnerving, but horror stories, or dark fiction dealing with human cruelty, were not new in 1948. Possibly it’s simply because the story appeared in the New Yorker. But I also imagine it had something to do with Jackson’s straightforward (which is not to say plain) prose style. There’s no horror in the descriptive passages, only in Tess Hutchinson’s reaction to her situation. This is the genius behind the story, and in so much of Jackson’s other writing. In fact, she wrote one of the most famous paragraphs in horror literature, the one that opens her great novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). This paragraph is so well-known that I’m going to eschew it (though editor and writer Benjamin Dreyer diagrams it here, for those unfamiliar) in favor of one that is less well-known but is, to me, almost as brilliant. (Read more.)