“La Strega” by Shirley Jackson: Dissociation from Reality Between Horror and Psychology
- Francesca Rucco
- Dec 11, 2024
- 7 min read
Many writers have delved into creating narrative content that carefully examines the psychological construction—and subsequent loss—of the self. Shirley Jackson succeeded in addressing this by striking chords of the human spirit that, to a large extent, resonate with all of us, weaving a thread that connects the psyche to that unconscious part of our soul we call fear.
The author, a member of the 20th-century American literary movement, always revolved around her muses, which, instead of being entities of inspiration and creation, might remind us of the Keres of Greek mythology—the female spirits of death who bring destruction, madness, and ruin in their wake.
The characters born from Jackson’s mind are invariably subjugated by something external: a veiled presence, a faint but persistent noise, an unidentified shadow, or a passerby telling macabre stories before leaving as if nothing happened. Slowly, caught up in this process of destruction, her characters are abandoned by reality itself, entering a world of uncertainty, madness, and terror and this creates a sort of dissociation from reality between horror and psicology.
We will never fully understand whether this terror is real or alive only in their minds, and this is precisely what makes Shirley Jackson’s stories timelessly frightening.
On October 31, 2023, Adelphi published a collection of Jackson’s short stories, including The Witch, The Drunkard, Charles, and The Tooth, all originally released in 1949.
The common thread tying these stories together is the dissociation from reality, blending horror and psychology, that each character faces within the narratives.
First story
In the first story a young boy is caught off guard when a man approaches him and his family in a train carriage heading in an unknown direction. The man begins recounting a story of harm he inflicted on his younger sister. The tale takes a grim and terrifying turn as he admits to having killed her and then fed her to a bear. Sitting across from his mother and his own little sister, the boy seems to be overwhelmed by dark and disturbing thoughts triggered by the man’s account.
The story’s atmosphere is rendered almost fairytale-like through Jackson’s style, particularly with the introduction of the devouring bear, evoking the sinister undertones of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. It makes us wonder whether the boy has come into contact with another side of himself, whether the man is the witch he had just claimed to see outside the train window, or whether the man is an emanation of his future self.
Shirley Jackson leaves us in the void, haunted by the fear that any of these possibilities could be true.
Did that man really chop his little sister into pieces?“It was a joke,” said the mother, adding insistently, “A joke.” “Maybe,” said the boy. Then, holding his lollipop, he returned to his seat and resumed staring out the window. “Maybe he was a witch.”
Second story
The second story also explores the constant overlapping and annihilation of two entities engaged in a chillingly apocalyptic conversation about the future. In English, the title “The Intoxicated” provides a more fitting lens through which to interpret the story: a drunk man meets a teenage girl at a party, and both display a profound cynicism toward the world.
The girl is convinced that the world will end soon, while the man almost hopes for its demise so that he can perish along with it. Returning to the title, we see the two protagonists as intoxicated—not only by alcohol but also by a worldview that refuses to embrace improvement or progress, instead envisioning only a complete reversal of humanity itself.
“Things will be different after,” said the girl. “Everything that makes the world what it is today will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there will be a law against living in houses, so no one can hide.”
The reference to houses in this quote is of great significance: the author’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, features the house itself as the true protagonist, shaping and deepening the personalities of the characters in the story. For Shirley Jackson, the four walls that shelter us from the outside world hold profound meaning.
It is particularly striking that in “The Intoxicated,” it is a seventeen-year-old girl who perceives houses as hiding places—a cave where one conceals their worst traits. This identity in flux already sees the construction of the self as fractured, envisioning a future where there will be no places to become who we believe we are meant to be, only who we are condemned to become.
“Maybe there will be a law requiring all seventeen-year-olds to stay in school and learn some common sense,” he said, standing up.“There won’t be schools,” she replied flatly. “No one will learn anything. So we don’t end up back where we are now.”
The author’s style guides us through a post-human vision, or rather, a kind of pre-humanity—a return to savagery, a definitive departure from culture. In this regression, society will have to start over from scratch, and as a cause-and-effect, every individual will become someone else, another self.
Third story
In the third story of the collection, the protagonist is a young boy, Laurie, who complains to his family about the pranks and mischief of Charles, a boy in his class. It is revealed only at the end of the story that Charles never actually existed.
This narrative initially reminds us of how intricate a child’s imagination can be. Yet, upon reflection, the chills the story leaves us with may arise from the uncertainty about whether that reality is truly real and tangible. Is Laurie imagining everything? Is his psyche irreparably split, causing him to behave—and later perceive himself—as two separate and distorted people?
Here again, Jackson leaves us in doubt. What appears to be a psychological disorder might just as well be a horrifying emanation of a ghost.
“Laurie usually adapts very quickly,” I said. “I suppose this time he’s been influenced by Charles.” “Charles?” “Yes,” I said, laughing. “You must have your hands full at school with Charles.” “Charles?” said the teacher. “We don’t have any Charles at school.”
Fourth story
The final story follows the journey of a woman, Clara, who leaves her small hometown to travel to New York for a dental visit due to severe pain in a tooth.
In this tale, the dissociation of the self begins with the bus ride, as the woman leaves a small, familiar world to embrace a much larger one—the metropolis.
Under the influence of painkillers and terrified by the possible (and ultimately inevitable) extraction of her tooth, Clara embarks on what we might call the “hero’s journey.” However, unlike traditional narratives, this journey does not culminate in the exaltation of the protagonist. Instead, we are presented with an entity teetering on the edge of madness and horror, a woman who no longer recognizes herself in the mirror.
During her journey, Clara meets Jim, a presence that remains undefined and confined to a realm we are not allowed to fully understand. The man seems almost supernatural, possibly symbolizing God, the Devil, or a fragmented aspect of Clara’s psyche—it is left ambiguous.
Once again, the fairytale element is prominent. Jim affects Clara with his words, which resemble a slow, inescapable chant—a story told before the dark night. Much like Dante on his otherworldly journey, Clara detaches from reality, fainting and regaining consciousness repeatedly, lulled by Jim’s phrases, which feel out of context, distant, and belonging to an ancient, sinister world.
Upon arriving, the doctor informs her that she should have had the tooth removed a long time ago.
[...]“Perhaps all human ailments were contained in the teeth, and he could have cured them if only people had sought treatment in time.”
During the extraction, under anesthesia, the woman enters the mysterious world that serves as the backdrop to the story, where she encounters Jim once again.
“At first, everything moves away, she thought, remember that. And remember the sound and the metallic taste of everything. And the outrage. And then the swirling music, the music that echoed confused and deafening all around and never stopped, and she was running headlong down a long, horrible empty hallway with doors on both sides, and at the end of the hallway was Jim, stretching out his hands and laughing and shouting something she couldn’t hear because of the deafening music, and she kept running, saying: ‘I’m not afraid,’ and someone grabbed her arm and pulled her through a door, and the world grew terrifyingly large, infinitely so, and then stopped, with the dentist’s head looking down at her and the window returning to its place across from her and the nurse holding her arm […] ‘God gave me blood to drink.’”
Following the tooth extraction, the woman reaches the peak of her madness. She no longer recognizes herself in the mirror; her identity is fractured, much like the missing tooth, as though all her pain had encapsulated her entire personality. Supporting this idea is a scene where, in her despair, she looks into her bag and finds that all her documents are gone—everything that could confirm her existence in reality has vanished.
Ultimately, fully removed from her former self and now a creature of the world she had glimpsed during the operation, the story concludes with a more definitive ending than the others. Shirley Jackson explicitly tells us that the woman chooses to walk barefoot alongside Jim, on the warm sand he had spoken of during their drowsy bus ride.
Shirley Jackson’s world is both dreamlike and deeply real. In this collection, as in her other works, she provides a profound exploration of the human psyche and the fragile boundary between what we believe to be real and what may not be. Her tales immerse us in stories of witchcraft and spirits that clash with the surreality of life.
Article published on October 13, 2024, in L’Altro Settimanale
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