Shirley Jackson and the Racial Imagination
Analysis of “After You, My Dear Alphonse” and “Flower Garden” from the collection The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
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I, like many people, have loved Shirley Jackson before I read Shirley Jackson. The endless adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House have made Jackson a juggernaut in the horror genre. So much so that most people think she’s a female Stephen King—a writer of terrifying and gothic work. It’s colored my vision of her and gave me pre-conceived expectations of what the short story collection would contain. Out of everything I expected, I didn’t expect that Jackson had stories with non-white characters.
Most of the stories in the collection center around mid-class white people and sometimes working-class white women. Except for two stories, “After You, My Dear Alphonse” and “Flower Garden,” which both deal with racism. At first glance, both stories take the same critical look at racism as Jackson does to gender roles in the home and parenting. But alongside Jackson’s short story collection I was reading The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. The book, like the title suggests, examines how race is used in speculative fiction and the way people of color are used within stories to tell narratives of corruption, evil, and darkness.
In Thomas’ book, she proposes that most authors, specifically white, use Black characters as ways of talking about issues surrounding race in a way that allows them to work on their guilt by transforming Black characters into symbolic monsters that stick to a cycle of being a spectacle, treated with apprehension and hesitation, inflicted with violence that often leads to physical or symbolic death, and turned into a constant thematic or spiritual haunting on the story.
Thomas has a final stage of the cycle called emancipation, “It is reached only when the Dark Other is liberated from spectacle, embodied hesitation, violence, and haunting. Narratives with liberated Dark Others are rare…” (The Dark Fantastic, Thomas, pg. 28). The emancipation part of the cycle is rare in stories by white authors because there is no framework for them to pull from and create a character that is freed and seen as a person or character outside of their ability to stand in as a prop within the story.
Reading about the dark fantastic cycle connected feelings and thoughts I had surrounding Jackson’s handling of the Black characters within her stories. Jackson’s Black characters never reach emancipation and stay trapped in spectacle, hesitation, and violence never achieving any sense of freedom or agency outside of being characters meant to show how harmful racism is. Both stories treat the Black characters as spectacles to be gawked and watched.
Each moment that a Black character is introduced the white characters are awakened from their fantasy of an all-white world. And the violence displayed in Jackson’s stories is all micro-aggression and soft racism. No one, but the children, make an assault toward the Black characters but their violence is more insidious.
Mrs. Wilson lifted the plate of gingerbread off the table as Boyd was about to take another piece. “There are many little boys like you, Boyd, who would be very grateful for the clothes someone was kind enough to give them.” (After You, My Dear Alphonse, Jackson, pg. 89)
Another concept that Thomas’ book introduced me to is the racial imaginary and the idea that within the imagination of white writers, characters of color only exist as a prop and harsh memory of racism and colonization while writers of color must think about race because there is no true escape from how racism has affected us.
Since Jackson is viewed as a writer with keen and witty observation skills, her lack of understanding or self-reflection at the fact that the only characters of color in her stories are those who are being used to prove a point about how racist someone else is in the story without realizing that telling a story using Black characters as ‘expressionless’ props is equally, if not more, racist.
This type of use of Black characters is still running wild today with many white authors not giving their characters ethnicities unless they aren’t white and they are being used as a moral argument. While in both stories, the racist behavior depicted is on the nose to how micro-aggressions come out even today, it still misses the mark on telling a story that not only critiques and looks at racism but that goes beyond to showcase any real anti-racist commentary or thought.
In both stories, Jackson tries to critique racism while also deftly perpetuating it herself in her own stories without realizing. There is a moment in The Flower Garden where it seems like Jackson may be aware enough to know that the work of fixing racism is on Black people. “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.” (The Flower Garden, Jackson, pg. 133) This small moment showcases the work Black people do to uproot a problem that isn’t theirs to begin with while white people leave the problem for dreams of somewhere else where they can live trouble-free.
Jackson choosing to only ever feature Black characters in her stories as props and moral lessons shows that she wasn’t capable of crafting stories that critiqued her own life and place in the problems of the world but placed her above it and with those she so often villainized in her work. This inability by Jackson to see Black people as anything but harsh reminders and labor permeated her work and the work of her white peers who also never featured people of color unless as gags, props, or conflict jesters has led to a prevalence today of white writers not crafting diverse worlds because writers deemed as great never did it.