Horror writer Shirley Jackson is most renowned for her short story "The Lottery", once aptly described by The Simpsons' Kent Brockman as "a chilling tale of conformity gone mad". Still, when I read her 1949 anthology The Lottery and Other Stories (partly on account of Brockman's recommendation), I found that I was less taken with the titular story, although it left more than its desired share of psychological scars, than I was the comparatively modest and less dramatic "Charles". First published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1948, this story presents a wry snapshot of contemporary family life centred around a child's first few weeks at kindergarten, narrated from the viewpoint of a parent who is apprehensive about him taking his first major steps into the wider world. It made such a strong impression, I suspect, on account of its amusing twist ending, which is, truth be told, far from the most shocking you'll ever encounter. In fact, I have met other readers who've complained that the twist is all-too easy to see coming, and that they figured it out well in advance of the protagonist. And fair enough, that was my experience too. But then I think that's more-or-less the point. In the early stages of the story we share the narrator's apprehension over what her son is witnessing, but as the story continues we grow increasingly disconnected from her suppositions, as our own intuition clues us in as to what is more likely going on. From then on, it becomes a matter of revelling in the dramatic irony as she edges ever closer to that uncomfortable sting in the tail.
Anyway, if you've never read "Charles" then I advise you to do so before reading any further. Spoilers will follow.
"Charles" is told from the perspective of a mother whose small child, Laurie, has recently started kindergarten and developed an apparent fascination with an ill-behaved classmate named Charles. Charles' belligerent attitude and hearty appetite for rebellion regularly bring him into conflict with adult authority; each lunchtime, Laurie returns home with a daily report of Charles' misdeeds and the entailing punishments he was forced to endure. In spite of Charles' penchant for lashing out violently at the other children, he seems to have amassed quite the following, with classmates lining up to play with him, even when instructed otherwise by their teacher, and dutifully staying behind to watch whenever Charles is kept after school. The narrator notices that Laurie's behaviour at home is becoming increasingly unruly and attributes this to the negative influence of Charles. She and her husband are troubled by Laurie's veneration of Charles, yet they come to share in his fascination with the unseen hell-raiser, to the extent that "Charles" becomes a catch-all metaphor for any kind of mishap or misdemeanour around their household. They are surprised, and incredulous, when Laurie's stories later indicate a shift in Charles' behaviour - he begins to help his teacher around the classroom and goes for days without causing trouble - although a relapse eventually occurs when Charles discovers the joys of curse words. The narrator attends her first PTA meeting where, tellingly, she is far more interested in learning more about Charles and his family than she is her own son. However, she is surprised when Charles and his barrage of bad behaviours are never raised. At the end, she manages to get Laurie's teacher aside and hears that Laurie had a difficult start adjusting to kindergarten, but that his recent behaviour has been more positive. The narrator starts to talk about her favourite subject, Charles, and how much he has evidently impacted her son. The teacher looks puzzled, and gives her the bad news: "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten."
As I say, I don't believe that the reader truly shares in the narrator's (presumable)
shock at the final implication (that Laurie was describing his own behaviours all along) as Jackson telegraphs it clearly enough in the
preceding text. The parents are not exactly innocents, in spite of how guilelessly they swallow their son's daily reports, and they patently set themselves up for a humbling at multiple points throughout the story. The instant their fascination extends beyond Charles himself and onto the kind of parents who could
have raised such an unruly monster, you can practically feel their superiority sneaking around and up behind them to bite them in the buttocks. The sweet irony at the centre of the story has less to do with Laurie convincing his parents of the existence of this phantom Charles than it does his inadvertently conning them into turning the cold eye of judgement upon themselves. The unspoken tension of the piece arises not from Laurie's obsession with Charles, but from the narrator's obsession with another phantom in the form of Charles' mother, about whom she is plainly drawing a number of unpleasant conclusions. The final line functions as a punchline, a joke at her expense, for her fixation has, ultimately, amounted to a tremendous self-own.
And, in spite of this, I have to admit that I do feel a certain degree of sympathy for the narrator. A question that persistently bothers me whenever I return to the story is, "Was she supposed to have figured it out on her own?" To be totally fair to her, it's not as though the school have made any kind of effort to get in touch with her about her son's behaviour. She misses the first PTA meeting, thus enabling the myth of Charles to continue for a while longer, but she has a valid enough reason for doing so (her younger child was sick). When you're aware of the twist, then looking back through the story there a number of points where she seems to miss what is plainly right under her nose - the most glaring example being when she describes how Charles became "an institution in our family", and Laurie's exhibition of unruly behaviour at home, by filling his wagon with mud and pulling it though the kitchen, gets lost amid the ordinary chaos of family life (I note here that Jackson is perhaps not quite as on the nose as she could have been - while the baby actually "was" a Charles when she cried all afternoon, Laurie simply "did" a Charles). And yet, in her defence she's hardly alone in her willingness to accept her son's stories at face value, as her husband is every bit as clueless as she is. In fact, her husband has no interest in attending the PTA meetings at all, although he does ask the narrator to invite Charles' mother around for a cup of tea afterwards so that he can satisfy his morbid curiosity without leaving the comfort of his home. (Then again, "Charles" was written in the 1940s, and perhaps there was an expectation back then that attendance of PTA meetings was solely the mother's responsibility? On that note, the judgements of both parents are only ever explicitly projected onto Charles' mother - the possibility that Charles' father could be a negligent role model is never raised. Make of that what you will.)
I think the answer to my question is most implicit in the teacher's tactful remark: "We are all so interested in Laurie." The protagonist's main failing throughout the story is that she has simply not been all that interested in her own son. This is likewise underscored during Charles' apparent gravitation toward good behaviour - the narrator's husband asks her to find out at the PTA meeting "what happened to Charles", to which the narrator responds, "I'd like to know myself", an exchange that seems poignant when you know that they're actually inadvertently admitting just how poorly they understand their own son. The assumption that Laurie's insolent behaviour at home is due to the negative influence of Charles is appealing to them because it is convenient, in enabling them to project responsibility onto an outside factor. Their resulting fixation with Charles' mother is rooted in their eagerness for her to be held accountable for the disturbance. We can see how this fixation is further obstructing Laurie's efforts to relate to his parents his school experiences during an episode where he informs them that "Our teacher had a friend come to see her in school today", and both parents simultaneously respond, "Charles's mother?" (he was, in fact, referring to his gym teacher). Attending the PTA meeting is, likewise, treated less as an opportunity to understand how Laurie is functioning at school than it is to see Charles' mother get her much-anticipated comeuppance. The narrator is bothered when, during the meeting, nobody stands up and apologises for how her son has been acting - a statement which, unbeknownst to her, drips with the uncomfortable suggestion that the rest of the meeting is silently judging her and wondering why she is not making a similar display of contrition.
"Charles" is, on one level, a cautionary tale about the perils of judging others, for we never know when that judgement might ricochet awkwardly back on us. On another level, it is a humorous and down-to-earth account of a universal parental nightmare - the point at which your child ventures into the outside world and you no longer control who they will encounter or how their own interests and personality will develop. The narrator ends up having to confront the greater nightmare still that your child might even be the one who tempts others to the dark side. First and foremost, though, "Charles" is a story about the fear of and inevitability of change. At the start of the story, before the titular menace has entered the picture, the narrator is having to deal with the reality that the idealised version of Laurie, the "sweet-voiced nursery school tot" no longer exists, and that she is losing him to the wider world. There are two parallel stories unfolding along this theme - the first-hand account of how the narrator responds to the loss of that sweet-voiced tot and the more complicated creature who had taken his place, and the second-hand account of how Laurie copes with the disruptions to his own established routine. If we read between the lines, then it seems reasonable enough to conclude that Laurie's acting out at school is in response to the dramatic changes to his day-to-day life - his assumption of the "Charles" persona suggests both resistance to these changes and enjoyment at having a whole new set of boundaries to test. His eventual improvement suggests that he is beginning to settle. By this point, Laurie/Charles is ready to assume a new role, but not so ready that he cannot resist the occasional relapse.
This leads us into the story's other key question, which is why Laurie feels the need to draw a distinction between the boy he is at home and the child he becomes at school. After all, it's not as though there is a world of difference between Laurie and Charles - he is as contentious toward his parents' authority as his teachers and besides, I suspect that he is a mite too young to be terribly conscious of the kind of image he maintains in their eyes. The obvious answer is that Laurie would sooner avoid having to face additional repercussions from his parents for his behaviours at school, but at the same time is compelled to attempt to communicate with them what he is going through. Laurie's daily excitement in relating news of Charles' latest misdeeds makes it unclear if he actively enjoys the deception, or if he is reacting to how much further he is able to go over the line each day, as if awed by his own capacity for defiance. The story becomes doubly poignant if you read it from the perspective that Laurie, unable to understand his situation or why he is compelled to behave as he does, has been reaching out to his parents the entire time.
For Laurie's parents, the phantom Charles becomes emblematic of this unwelcome process of change. He is dreaded to the point that he basically becomes an incorporeal entity, a corrupting influence who permeates the family home and unleashes all manner of disturbances within - which, in reality, are the kind of banal, everyday mishaps one would expect to occur in a family home on any given weekend. The baby cries too much, the father knocks down some items with the telephone cord, and even Laurie's aforementioned adventure with the mud-filled wagon seems entirely devoid of genuine malice. This is the point in the story in which the narrator unwittingly reveals that Laurie could take on the role of Charles, but it is also the point in which she unwittingly exposes the source of their troubles as coming from inside their family unit and not the world outside. Charles may be an intruder in their domestic paradise, but Laurie's parents seem reluctant to let their adopted scapegoat go - when Laurie later brings reports of a quieter, more obedient Charles, his father suggests (somewhat ludicrously, given the age of the child) that "when you've got a Charles to deal with, this may mean he's only plotting". The reality is that Laurie, having made the initial shift from sweet-voiced tot to insolent hell-raiser, is on the cusp of yet another change - his time as Charles was merely a phase, one of several steps on his ongoing development as a person. This underscores one of the other great ironies of Jackson's story - that Laurie, ultimately, is more resilient and accepting of change than either of his parents; for all of his freshness, he does not share in any of their prejudices. Just as his parents would sooner their son remained frozen as a sweet-voiced tot for eternity, they are comfortable with "Charles" being forever pigeonholed as an incorrigible undesirable whose only talent is for spreading ruination, and the picture they accordingly paint of his mother alongside. Hence the other implicit meaning of the teacher's closing statement that, "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten." Nobody is as two-dimensional as they assume.
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