Charles

Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1948

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Themes

Exteriors, Underbellies, and Psychological Ambiguity

Though “Charles” may not be a horror story, it carries certain themes that typify Jackson’s other literature. Among these themes is the idea that mundane, innocuous, or respectable semblances can mask more sinister (or at least dysfunctional) realities. The most famous example is Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948), in which a small town harbors a dreadful ritual. However, the theme often further involves the idea that such sinister realities needn’t be imposing to be consequential. This idea appears in Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil” (1965), in which a seemingly harmless character’s commitment to her town is a form of manipulation and possessiveness.

As far as innocuous exteriors go, a kindergartener is an ideal candidate, and in “Charles,” the story’s title announces the malignant underbelly. Not only does Laurie incarnate the theme of exteriors and underbellies, but the incarnation is what animates the plot. Without Laurie’s duality, there is no story. However, another recurring concern in Jackson’s work is psychological ambiguity or unknowability, and this also ties to Laurie’s duality: Even with the assumption that Charles exists because Laurie wants a scapegoat, the extent of Charles’s malignancy is ambiguous. Laurie may be misbehaving because he wants to push boundaries, or develop his identity, or craft a story. Nevertheless, because he takes clear delight in Charles’s injurious behavior but turns cold when relaying Charles’s benevolence, the simplest suggestion is that Laurie takes pleasure in causing harm. This pleasure does have a sinister quality, especially when paired with the unusual intelligence involved in a kindergartener’s premeditated scapegoating.

While Laurie’s dysfunctional underbelly drives the story, his innocuous exterior is no less important. The façade is what deceives his parents and allows them to maintain their own respectable exterior—an exterior that, likewise, masks an inner dysfunction.

Unidealized Family Dynamics

The story’s portrayal of domesticity also relates to the idea of respectable exteriors. Laurie, his mother and father, and his baby sister comprise a picturesque American family of four, an arrangement that reflects the era’s conservative and highly conventional ideal of domesticity: the nuclear family. Jackson, however, pokes fun at the cultural assumption that such outward appearances suggest any inner merit, and she portrays family dynamics without the sheen of idealism.

Laurie’s parents are invested in (and complacent about) their family’s respectability, but the family dynamics are suspect. For example, on the first day when Laurie comes home, the narrator remarks, “At lunch he spoke insolently to his father, spilled his baby sister’s milk, and remarked that his teacher said we were not to take the name of the Lord in vain” (73). Later, the narrator says “Good heavens” in order to be “mindful of the Lord’s name” (73). Though she shows no interest in correcting her son’s behavior, she is “mindful” of decorum. Likewise, when Laurie says he “didn’t learn nothing” in school (73), she corrects his grammar.

Laurie’s mother and father play different roles in the parenting dynamic. While Laurie doesn’t misbehave with his mother, he speaks rudely to his father and even calls him names. All the same, Laurie’s father is much more disengaged, electing to let events transpire as they are, saying, “[I]t’ll be all right” (74). The narrator is much more concerned about Charles’s influence on her son, and she attends the P.T.A. meeting. Meanwhile, both parents take for granted that Laurie’s father won’t attend. And earlier, when the narrator couldn’t attend the first P.T.A. meeting because her baby had a cold, the idea never occurred to her that her husband could go in her stead—or that he could care for the sick baby while she herself attended. Parental caretaking responsibility falls disproportionately and even entirely on Laurie’s mother; historically, this attitude was a symptom of the same mindset that idolized the nuclear family. This attitude also explains the narrator’s and her husband’s assumption that Charles’s mother—not Charles’s father—is culpable for Charles’s antics. Charles’s father is never even mentioned.

Laurie’s mother and father play separate roles in Laurie’s upbringing, but they both buy into Laurie’s lies, and both are equally curious to see what Charles’s mother could be like. Laurie’s father tells his wife to invite Charles’s mother over for a cup of tea after the P.T.A. meeting because he wants “to get a look at her” (77), and the narrator replies with a prayer that Charles’s mother will, in fact, attend the meeting. They have both fallen for Laurie’s untruths and put themselves and their family on a pedestal in the process.

Hypocrisy and the Danger of Assumption

Jackson’s story renders the possible consequences of hypocrisy and assumption, and the unfolding is inseparable from narrative structure and other rhetorical elements: The story delivers a message through didactic and subversive storytelling. Didactic storytelling is the art of progressing through a narrative with the pedagogical intent of instilling a lesson or moral into the audience. Subversive storytelling is the art of upending expectations with twists and turns in the narrative arc. “Charles” blends these two storytelling modes.

Some of the story’s didactic potential relies on the reader’s imaginative posture. Upon beginning the story, a reader may side with Laurie’s parents and judge Charles’s mother—how could she raise a child that is so badly behaved? What type of woman would end up with a child like Charles? If a reader does buy into this condemnation, and if they preserve this attitude to the last page, they will be sent reeling at the end of the story with the teacher’s revelation of Charles’s unreality. Such a reader must then turn their judgment on themselves—how could they have fallen prey to preconceived ideas about mothers and badly behaved children? What right do they have to judge or blame a mother for a child’s behavior without knowing the entire story?

Even if a reader is, from the outset, leery of the parents’ fixation on Charles’s mother, the story retains elements of a cautionary tale. Regardless of a reader’s sympathy for the characters, those characters enact the corollary of hypocrisy and baseless assumption. Laurie’s mother, as both the narrator and the story’s prime (if unwitting) hypocrite, experiences the narrative’s acute subversion, and the reader is witness to this. The narrator was not merely mistaken; she is now retroactively the target of her past allegations of failed mothering. No less than her understanding of the world, her understanding of herself is called into question. The reckoning portrays a timeless maxim: Pride goes before the fall.

Jackson orchestrates the subversion by setting up two assumptions sometimes made by and about mothers of small children: The first is a mother’s assumption that her children are well-behaved angels who would never lie; the second is the assumption that a child’s behavioral issues must be the fault of the mother. The narrator makes both these assumptions. When Laurie comes home with tall tales, the narrator unquestioningly accepts them as truths, and she automatically attributes Charles’s vices to his mother. Then, at the end, when Laurie’s teacher reveals that they “don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten” (77), the narrator must face a new reality: She has been not only deluded but complacent. Jackson achieves her didactic end through subversive means.