Shirley Jackson, 1949
Reading for depth means understanding a story off the page, too.
I bet you’re familiar with Shirley Jackson. Her short story, “The Lottery,” is one of those famous pieces of American literature that gets taught in high schools and MFA programs. Some of her novels are nearly as well-known and have been adapted to film, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for instance. She is another prolific writer with a troubled life who died too young, leaving me to wonder what she would have produced in her later years, if only she’d lived to see them.
I recently had my coaching group read her story, “The Daemon Lover,” published in 1949. I want to share some of my thoughts with you, not so much about the story, but about reading and meeting a story where it’s at to better understand it, the author, and to get more out of your reading.
The Story
In “The Daemon Lover,” our main character is never named. A thirty-four-year-old woman, she wakes on her wedding day anxious for everything to go well. Through the description of her movements, we realize that she is a single, working woman in a single room apartment that has a tiny kitchenette behind a closet door. Dressing for her big day presents a serious dilemma for our protagonist. Should she wear the blue dress, which is plain and her fiancé has seen her in several times, or the print dress which is really too young for her? She feels pretty in the print dress, but it’s not the right season for it yet, and she’s afraid people will think she’s trying to look youthful and will see her as silly. The wedding, we understand, is to be a quick affair—like the one leading up to this day—at the courthouse. Her own sister doesn’t even know it’s her wedding day.
As the clock ticks on, her anxiety grows. Her fiancé is late. She frets and is too afraid of missing his arrival to even go down to the corner shop for something to eat. Eventually, she searches the city streets for her lover, unable to accept the fact that he broke his promise, abandoning her on her wedding day after, we might add, encouraging her dreams of a future as a Missus.
The Readers
Everyone in my workshop is, obviously, contemporary. None of us were alive in 1949 when the story was published. When I asked the writers about the character and how they viewed her, they used words like anxious and neurotic. Her panic over the print dress seemed too much. They said things like, “I mean, it’s a dress. If you feel pretty in it, just wear it. It’s your wedding day, after all!” I can see why readers would feel that way; however, if we want to get the most out of our stories, it helps to consider not only the content, but also the intent, and context.
Content refers to what’s on the page, the story itself.
Intent refers to the author’s reason for writing it, her purpose, what she wanted to communicate.
Context refers to all of the external factors surrounding the piece, the milieu in which it was written.
I’m going to focus on context here because something happened when I explained a little of the context around “The Daemon Lover” to the writers in my group.
Check out my article, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Point of View,” in the current issue of WriterCon Magazine, publisher .
The Context
Jackson published this story in 1949. You may have noticed that I mention that above. I mentioned it to my coaching group, too, before we began the discussion. As the conversation got rolling and I saw how the character was being read and judged, I asked my writer-readers to consider this woman in the context in which the story is set, which is the context in which Jackson wrote it. The context is not written into the story. It is assumed: written and published in 1949, it would have been read in 1949. Nothing needed to be said on the page for context to be communicated. For today’s readers, it helps to pause and consider.
We are told she is 34 in 1949.
Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941. She would have been 26.
World War II ended in 1945. She would have been 30.
When the U.S. went to war, our protagonist would have been nearing the end of her marriageable years. When the soldiers came home, she was long in the tooth, as the saying goes. By 1949, at age thirty-four, she is being put out to pasture. Imagine being a young woman in the first half of the 20th century. The story is very short, we get no backstory about the woman, but we can assume her dream was to marry and have a family, to run a household and grow old in domestic bliss.
She was probably already a working girl before the war, minding a shop counter or waitressing, possibly a secretary. I say this because of her age. At twenty-six, she was no youthful bloom, but an adult out in the world. With every year she aged, her prospects diminished. Then came the war and away went the men. More than 400,000 of those men did not come home, and of those who did over 700,000 had been wounded. Circumstance sealed the fate of our protagonist, and we see it playing out in the setting of this story. She has a job, but it is never named. She has an apartment to herself, but it is a single room with a closet kitchenette. And still, some small part of her heart clings to her girlhood dream of being happily wed and having a family.
As if that isn’t enough, she lives in a society in which women are judged based on not only their looks, but also their marital status. She was left on the shelf, never chosen by any man before or after the war. Her value in this world is awfully small, and she knows it. When she is fretting over which dress to put on, the plain blue or the print dress, her concern is not only reasonable, but perfectly human. Haven’t we all worried about appearances? About how someone will interpret our choices?
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Jackson uses this dress to great effect. The woman does wear the print dress, and as she goes searching for her lost lover, she encounters women and men whose gaze we feel. The women she meets are all married, the chosen, and their looks are more of pity than sympathy. They may not overtly scorn our protagonist, but there is judgment in the subtext, a sense of you should have known better. The men mock her for falling for the lover’s trap. Everyone knows exactly what happened: she drank up his lies and gave him everything he wanted just before he disappeared from her life. Her print dress becomes a mark of her foolishness and shame, so that by the end of the story she self-consciously tries to close her coat over it and hide it from the eyes of others.
In considering the context in which this story was written, we better understand what being a single, working class, thirty-four-year-old woman meant to our character. We also better understand what Jackson was writing about. Her intent—what she’s writing about, which is not a merely neurotic woman who can’t accept rejection, albeit a particularly cruel one—comes through strong and clear when we take a moment to consider the context in which the story was created.
Every time we read, we readers have our own context to consider. Because of our sensibilities and sensitivities, we can find ourselves misreading characters who are other to us, whether through time, place, or both. Being aware not only of the story and its author’s context, but also of our own, helps us get the most out of the stories we read.
After the writers in my coaching group considered the woman’s situation in 1949 specifically they remarked both that they understood the character differently—better, kinder—and that they liked the story more because it became meaningful and seemed to have more depth once they had a better understanding of its context.