HÅVARD NØRJORDET THE TALL MAN IN THE BLUE SUIT Witchcraft, Folklore, and Reality in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or, the Adventures of James Harris A Thesis presented to the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages the University of Oslo in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts degree Spring Term Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his ministers also disguise themselves as ministers of righteousness. Their end will match their deeds. — Corinthians .- (ca. ce) Thus Satan himself, who transfigures himself into an angel of light, when he has captured the mind of a miserable woman and has subjugated her to himself by infidelity and incredulity, immediately transforms himself into the species and similitudes of different personages and, deluding the mind which he holds captive and exhibiting things, joyous or mournful, and persons, known or unknown, leads it through devious ways, and while the spirit alone endures this, the faithless mind thinks these things happen not in the spirit but in the body. Who is there that is not led out of himself in dreams and nocturnal visions, and sees much sleeping which he had never seen waking? —Regino of Prüm, Canon Episcopi () Here are the Testimonies of sense, the Oaths of several credible attesters, the nice and deliberate scrutiny of quick-sighted and judicious examiners, and the judgment of an Affize upon the whole. [. .] If such proof [of witchcraft] may not be credited, no Fact can be proved, no wickedness can be punished, no right can be determined, Law is at an end, and blind Justice cannot tell how to decide any thing. —Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus () Witchcraft is little more than the judicious administration of the bizarre. —Shirley Jackson, The Bird’s Nest () Acknowledgments First of all, my supervisor, Professor Per Winther, must be thanked for his efforts; the enthusiasm and good judgment he brought to this project have been a great comfort. Colin Haines gave much valuable feedback through several conversations on the “only practicing witch in New England,” Gothic fiction, literary theory, demons, and other cheer- ful matters. His taking time to help while finishing his doctoral dissertation on Jackson (and grading a seemingly endless stream of exam papers) is much appreciated. Thanks also to Dr. Gunnar W. Knutsen, who read Chapter One and gave some valuable comments on my treatment of witchcraft, and Dr. Mathilde Skoie, who helped get my highly questionable explanation of Latin case inflections right. Annette Møller Madsen at the University Library of Arts and Social Sciences helped get hold of a book that was difficult to obtain. Fellow students and good friends Karen Bjørkan and Susan Jackman Røe read and com- mented on the text; I truly appreciate their constructive criticism and good company. Last, but certainly not least, my parents, Helene and John Nørjordet, deserve my deepest gratitude for their encouragement and support over the years. h.n. oslo–raufoss december 2003 – may 2005 cover illustration: “Devil seducing witch.” Anonymous woodcut from Ulrich Müller [Molitor], De Lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus (also known as Von den Unholden und Hexen), originally published in Cologne, ca. The Devil is seen trying to seduce a woman into making a pact with him. He appears to be both demonic and human, and the embrace has sexual overtones. source: Levack, plate . typeset in adobe caslon and dante in LATEX 2ε. iii Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction Shirley Jackson: Work, Reception, Criticism .......................................................... The Demon Lover: Literary and Biographical Precursors, and the Question of Belief ................... The Short Story Composite ................................................................................... The American Gothic............................................................................................ Witchcraft, Folklore, and Reality: Definitions and Points of Departure................... Aims, Scope, Theoretical and Structural Considerations......................................... A Note on the References ...................................................................................... “Between Here and There”: Demonology and Witchcraft Love, Doom, Madness, and Fate: The Greek Daemon ........................................... Nightmares and Demonic Copulation: Incubi, Succubi, and “The Daemon Lover”.................................................... Marginal Science: Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus triumphatus () ........................... “Blood to Drink”: Folklore and Rituals Ireland and the Sea: The Contexts of Child ...................................................... The Triumph of James Harris: “The Tooth” ........................................................... Between Archaic Rituals and Modern Democracy: “The Lottery” .......................... “Death is Never Real to Them”: The Sense of Reality Reading and Writing as Gothic Reflexivity............................................................. The Uncanny: The “Double,” Animism, and Repetition......................................... Dreams and the Lack of Memory as Structuring Principles..................................... The Fantastic......................................................................................................... Conclusion Paratexts and Reality.............................................................................................. The Past, the Present, and Reality .......................................................................... The Demon Lover and Reality............................................................................... The Short Story Composite ................................................................................... A Child Ballad : “James Harris (The Daemon Lover)” Works Cited iv Introduction “The Demon in the Mind” Shirley Jackson and the Occult Shall we never, never get rid of this Past! —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables The past is never dead. It is not even past. —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun The Devil’s greatest triumph was convincing the modern world that he does not exist. —G. K. Chesterton I have had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatural. I think this is because I find there so convenient a shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhuman world. [. .] Everything I write [involves] the sense I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment. (Oppenheimer ) Shirley Jackson (-)¹ said this in an interview in , the year she became famous by publishing a shocker of a story called “The Lottery.” The remarks give us important indi- cators as to how we might read the supernatural aspects of her fiction, the topic of the present thesis. First of all, it establishes that the supernatural was important to her. Secondly, we learn that we are to understand her preoccupation with this material not as descriptions of supernaturalism in itself, but as a means to depict “the possibilities of human adjustment” and the ongoing struggle to “keep in check forces of great destruction.” Thirdly, she points out that she is writing about a struggle that “may be the devil and may be intellectual en- lightenment.” That is: the contemporary world can be explored through the supernatural because we have always been involved in this kind of “not very rational” struggle that may or . Jackson’s year of birth is sometimes given as , a date Jackson herself used in order to seem younger than her husband; she was, however, born in , on December (Oppenheimer , ). introduction may not turn out to be evil. The notion that there is a deeper purpose behind Jackson’s use of the supernatural—that she is trying to say something about the world using the supernatural metaphorically, as it were—is an important premise for my discussion. In particular, I am interested in what Shirley Jackson is trying to say about reality by, paradoxically perhaps, alluding to the supernatural. This thesis explores the relationship between the supernatural and the real in the only book of short stories Shirley Jackson published in her lifetime, The Lottery, or the Adventures of James Harris (), focusing especially on how witchcraft and folklore is used in order to say something about the “inhuman world” Jackson mentions in the quotation above. In this introduction, the author and critical reception will first be presented, before The Lottery itself will be discussed, beginning with an attempt to determine its genre and nature (the short story composite and the Gothic are central aspects here). The demon lover motif, its centrality to the book, Jackson’s first encounter with it personally, and its literary history is then established. Then the three words that constitute the subtitle of the thesis—witchcraft, folklore, and reality—will be defined and discussed briefly. Finally, I state the aim of the thesis more clearly than I already have, present my theoretical and methodical considerations, and give a short outline of the following chapters. Shirley Jackson: Work, Reception, Criticism Shirley Jackson was a prolific writer. During her relatively short career, she published roughly one hundred separate short stories, one collection of stories, six novels, two humorous family