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  1. Horror Is Other People: Shirley Jackson and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”

    superworse:

    The first and most important thing to know about Shirley Jackson is that, at a certain point in her life, she became too afraid of people to leave her own house. She had reasons; she was married to the only Jewish guy in Bennington, Vermont, and the townsfolk plagued them. She didn’t fit in; she was odd in and of herself. (Her sense of humor was so morbid that, when she died in her sleep at age forty-eight, her family assumed for quite some time that she was playing a prank.) She was intensely self-conscious about her appearance, something that she’d learned from her very unsatisfactory mother. But this is what you need to know: Shirley Jackson was afraid to leave her house, afraid of being part of the world, and she spent much of her time as a writer explaining exactly why.

    You’ve read “The Lottery,” most likely; it’s one of those short stories that’s often inflicted on high school students. Which makes sense. Its basic premise – a happy town of good old-fashioned values, amongst which some values include picking out a townsperson once per year to merrily beat to death with rocks – should feel familiar to anyone who’s been a teenager. As should the fact that good Tessie Hutchinson is one of the Lottery’s biggest supporters, until

    The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

    Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

    Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

    “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

    That was the story’s nastiest take-away, the buried contempt in Jackson’s refusal to make Tessie in any way admirable or special. There’s no-one that we’re allowed to identify with in order to reassure ourselves that we’re good people: No idealistic young townsperson pointing out that, gosh golly gee, these Lotteries are killing people, no Katniss, no virtuous Christ getting nailed to the cross. These Lotteries are our values, they’re what we do. Participating in the Lottery is being a good person, isn’t it? Anyway, the only person who ever objects is the one who’s getting their skull crushed at the moment, and we don’t listen to them; it’s just a bunch of screaming. It’s always fair and right, until it’s you, is the intensely obvious message here, and it’s harsher for the fact that we know Tessie’s killed plenty of people, and never saw a problem with it until the first rock hit her.

    In late-1940s, post-WWII America, that message was particularly primed to hit a nerve; the magazine got scads of angrily canceled subscriptions, and more letters in response to “The Lottery” than it did in response to any other story in its history. Of these letters, Jackson later said that, if she thought they represented the reading public at large, she would stop writing.

    Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at… People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.

    But Jackson is being disingenuous here. In her view, people were gullible, rude, illiterate, horrible, and willing to do anything to fit in. That statement alone summarizes the basic thesis of half her work. 

    Read More

    This is worth reading in its entirety, but it’s worth reiterating the point that one trope of Shirley Jackson’s idea of horror was looking the other way when bad things happened to other people.

    (via tracesharp)

    2. Source: superworse

    Posted 7 months ago 56 notes

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      BFins, you should actually read The Shining, because...pretty big role in
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      first time, mostly...me curious. I don’t watch...I hate...
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      This is worth reading in its entirety, but it’s worth reiterating the point that one trope of Shirley Jackson’s idea of...
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