The Lottery and Other Stories (Modern Library Series)

Introduction by Patrick McGrath Displacement is perhaps the most persistent theme in the work of Shirley Jackson. In several stories in this collection the displacement is literal. "Like Mother Used to Make" tells of a hapless young man called David, who prepares dinner for the girl who lives in the apartment down the hall. She is the robust Marcia. She bursts into David's apartment--much neatter and more tasteful than her own--and eats the dinner he's made. Then a Mr. Harris--"a very large man"--comes calling for Marcia. He is invited into David's apartment. He settles down with Marcia on the couch while David washes the dishes. A little later David finds himself somehow taking his leave of the couple and going to Marcia's apartment. "It was cold, it was dirty, and as he thought miserably of his own warm home he heard faintly down the hall the sound of laughter--." He has been quite literally displaced; and the queer thing is, he accepts it. He recognizes that his own nice apartment should be occupied by Marcia and Mr. Harris rather than by himself. It's a simple tale, told in a few pages, but it illustrates a complicated truth about human nature, which is that we tend to assume the identity, more or less voluntarily, which others impose upon us. In her relentless exploration of this and associated ideas, Shirley Jackson at times resorted to wonderfully macabre imagery. In "Pillar of Salt" a New Hampshire woman on holiday with her husband in New York begins to go a little mad. This is not unusual in Shirley Jackson's work, where New York City is often depicted as a place quite capable of unhinging the vulnerable mind just by being itself. The couple spends a weekend on Long Island, where they come upon a human leg on the beach. It's a nice touch, for it deftly underscores the idea that for this woman everything is coming apart. And it is a form of displacement, too: human legs, severed at thigh and ankle, do not belong on sandy beaches. They should be attached, rather, to human torsos and have feet. Emotional displacement, however--that is, the projection of emotion, usually negative, onto a weak and innocent victim--drives the best of these stories. The scapegoat, in its first biblical incarnation, was a creature sent into the wilderness with the sins of the people symbolically heaped upon its head. Shirley Jackson returns again and again to the figure of the human scapegoat, often a young woman who comes as an outsider to a rural community, where she discovers cruelty and hypocrisy seething below the surface of apparently tranquil social waters. "The Renegade" is just such a story. The Walpoles are city folk who have recently moved to a country town. One morning Mr. Walpole gets a phone call to say that the family dog, Lady, has been killing the neighbor's chickens. Shirley Jackson has some rare sport with this. In the process she demonstrates just how poisonously vindictive small-town life can be. Mrs. Walpole is torn, of course, between her desire on the one hand to placate her neighbor and by extension the townspeople--all of whom want her chicken-killing dog destroyed---and on the other, to defend the honor of Lady. She seeks a compromise, but it's not forthcoming. Nice Mrs. Nash next door, cooking doughnuts, comfortably tells her that "'once they get the taste of blood...they'd rather kill than eat!'" Then old Mr. White, sitting on his porch, cheerfully calls out to her as she passes, "'Guess you're not going to have any more dog!'" The only solution, it seems, short of shooting the dog, is to tie a dead chicken around it's neck. The idea is, that as the chicken rots the dog becomes so sick of chicken it's cured of its bad habit. Various other revolting possibilities are outlined to Mrs. Walpole; but the worst of it is when her children come home for lunch, talking just as sadistically aJackson, Shirley is the author of 'The Lottery and Other Stories (Modern Library Series)', published 2000 under ISBN 9780679640394 and ISBN 0679640398.