Family Treasures

An appreciation of Shirley Jackson's short story

Continuing my appreciative tour of the Shirley Jackson short stories that are compiled by Penguin in Dark Tales, we come to Family Treasures.

On one level, Family Treasures is an allegory for family politics, crocodile tears, guilt, suspicion, shame, and—that phrase again!—casual cruelty. All within that most possessing of constructs in Jackson’s literature: the house.

On another level, it’s an allegory for how suspicion, confabulation, and group think leads to manufactured memories and unreliable, damning narratives of guilt and innocence in society at large.

Of how the innocent become guilty and the guilty become innocent. It seems strangely prescient of modern society, doesn’t it?

Incidentally, Shirley Jackson’s obsession with casual cruelty and the home as both sanctuary and prison seems to have its roots in her own strained relationships and agoraphobia. This is why I’m fascinated by reading her stories. To know about her is to get clues about the deeper meaning in her stories.

Anne Waite was a most unfortunate girl.

So opens this clever little story.

Anne lives in a disciplined school dorm. Permissions must be sought and granted for the kind of freedoms one might assume. She has found a personal, private freedom within the dorm’s institutionalised confines. It is a freedom granted to her by her anonymity. Her invisibility, even.

She saw life as a concession to the authorities, rather than as an imposed obligation.

Within these walls, a phrase I use deliberately to invoke women’s prisons, even though this is a school dorm, Jackson makes a point of telling us that some girls were permitted to turn a bathroom into a photography dark room. No explanation is given for the significance of this. Is it a simple index of privelige and favour? Is it an indication of wool being pulled over supervisory eyes? Narratively, the point is used as a device to motivate suspicious inferences, but I still wonder if the dark room is a signifier for something else.

Anne’s mother has died.

Although no cause to suspect this is given, there’s something about our learned expectations when we read a Shirley Jackson story that invites us to wonder if it was Anne who killed her. This story is about suspicion after all, and is anyone or anything ever truly innocent in any of Jackson’s stories?

Anne becomes the subject of insincere sympathy and calls to be brave, so the other girls can be relieved of having to care. They’re more interested in boys and the gifts they bring. They’re shallow, yes. We’re invited to judge it, but we’re also invited to recognise that capacity for shallowness in ourselves. Clever.

Anne turns to petty theft. Or perhaps returns to it. It’s ambiguous which is the case. She steals the gifts and mementos of the other girls. Treasures that Anne puts in the family chest.

This is where the story deftly takes us through the formation of suspiciously inferred narrratives, but is that all? I think not. I think Jackson also causes us to confront our prejudices. Is there a degree to which we think these girls may have deserved this? Is there a degree to which we sympathise with Anne, the kleptomaniac? Is there a degree to which we delight in the degradation she causes, seemingly because of the insincerity and shallowness of the victims?

Is Anne a victim, even? If so, of what, specifically?

Oh gosh, the more questions one asks, the more questions appear. This is the sign of a simple story that touches on deep themes.

The interesting thing is that Anne herself triggers the investigation into her thefts. Does she want to be caught? Is this guilt taking over? Or is this a clever ploy to manufacture immunity from suspicion, knowing that people will be more concerned with scandal avoidance than truth?

You’re not the thief because you won’t tell me who is. I’ve got to search your room, but we know, you and I, that it’s only a formal gesture.

Please, can’t we sort of keep it quiet, not have a scandal?

One of Jackson’s particularly clever narrative techniques is to portray the thefts as minor—almost innocent, even—but she leads us, unsuspecting, into a realisation of psychological violence. As she writes:

No one cared to speak. Each one knew the secrets of all the others. No one was inviolate any longer.

Devastating.

I’d like to close by pointing out the clever double meaning in the title. At first, we’re invited to think the treasures are what’s being stolen. Jackson leads us to realise that the real family treasures, the true contents of Anne’s treasure chest, are shame and guilt.

Many of Shirley Jackson’s short stories were published in her life time. Others were discovered after she died. As far as I can tell, Family Treasures was not published before 2015 and it is a great find.