“Charles”: a Dissimulative Inversion of Human Intimacy

In “Charles,” Shirley Jackson portrays a young boy, Laurie, and his first weeks in kindergarten. Laurie’s school life is characterized by the deviant actions of Charles, who, though it is never explicitly stated, is implied to be Laurie. The narrative is conveyed through the perspective of Laurie’s mother, detailing her reactions to the newest of Charles’s acting out. Although, it is apparent to the reader that Charles is most likely a persona created by Laurie in his relays of the past school day’s events to his family, his mother and father don’t seem to catch on. The short story ends with a small conversation between Laurie’s mother and his kindergarten teacher, in which it is finally revealed to the mother that Charles does not exist. Ultimately, Jackson’s story raises questions about the parent-child dynamic, the purpose of deceit as it appears in the text, and how vulnerable we each are to the lies of those around us.

While many may choose to grapple with Laurie’s motivations for lying, there is much to be said regarding the opposite perspective: why Laurie’s mother seems so blind to what the reader finds clear. It is evident from the beginning of the story that Laurie’s first day in school marks a large transformation—both physically and emotionally—his attire changing from “corduroy overalls with bibs” to “blue jeans with a belt,” her “sweet-voiced nursery-school tot” changing to a “swaggering character who forgot to…wave good-bye to me” (Jackson). And it is clear from his mother’s narrative that she experiences a dissonance between the kid she knew and the boy she knows. Perhaps, this is the reason that Laurie’s mother appears so oblivious to Laurie being Charles—that she is trying to hold onto an idealized version of her son. However, there is no direct textual evidence to support this claim, so, instead, the reader is left wondering how such a smart and self-assured woman is unaware of her child’s deceit. I believe this is precisely the author’s point. Shirley Jackson uses Laurie’s mother, an individual she characterizes to be rational and self-stable, to critique the imperviousness of the intelligent to deception and show that the gullibility is not dampened by competency.

Jackson deliberately crafts Laurie’s mother; she is not portrayed as dumb. Unlike the slow-witted father, who is often the butt-end of Laurie’s pranks and insults, Laurie’s mother is rather sharp. She recognizes the small but significant changes in Laurie’s persona at the beginning, and when Laurie responds incorrectly to his father, saying “I didn’t learn nothing,” she is quick to correct him: “ ‘Anything,’ I said” (Jackson). Jackson takes subtle measures to develop Laurie’s mother as a more mature, refined, and sensitive person.

This raises the question of how someone who is seemingly could be so easily conned and by none other than a child. Laurie’s mother moves and acts so self-assuredly–confident in her understanding and navigation of her environment and its interchanges with her. To be clear, she is neither overconfident nor arrogant, rather she exhibits a sort of overconfidence in her perception of events—that she has deduced from observation the most correct facts. In other words, she is principally preoccupied with her line of reasoning. When Laurie returns home after school one day, he reports that Charles hit the teacher. She asks if Charles was hit back in punishment and while Laurie responds affirmatively, she watches him prank her husband. But instead of telling Laurie off or allowing herself to deviate from her own train of thought she quickly presses on: “ ‘Why did Charles hit the teacher?’ I asked quickly” (Jackson 74). Maybe she found Laurie’s jokes inconsequential or that the mockery was normal, but still it seems that she is enveloped in a bubble of her own independent interactions with Laurie’s story. This is best demonstrated with her frantic search for Charles’s mother at the PTA meeting: “I sat restlessly, scanning each comfortable matronly face, trying to determine which one hid the secret of Charles. None of them looked to me haggard enough.” Here precisely, she exudes the presumptive attitude that disposes her to Laurie’s deceit. She feels she has a strong grasp on her environment and the order of things. This calls into question the source of her comfortability and her presumed degree of control.

Laurie’s mother, and humanity in general, derives this sense of order from at least two concepts according to Henry Frankfurt in his essay “Truth, Lies, and Bullshit.” The first is from a pervasive belief in one’s “ability to discriminate” between the truth and everything else. He says that “general confidence…in others is not essential,” so long as we have good reason to “hav[e] a certain sort of confidence in ourselves” (Frankfurt 39). But as Frankfurt continues on to note, we have no tools that would provide the meaningful substance for such an ability, in his words, we are “rather easily fooled.” Yet, we still believe that we retain a degree of control in protecting ourselves from deceit. This is true, but manifests itself in a different application. We judge characters, not sentences. We choose people to trust, believing, generally, that as they are trustworthy, their words have merit in fact and reality. This is Frankfurt’s second concept of “second nature,” that as we grow close to someone, “trusting them becomes like second nature.” Therefore, the competent mind, a mind like Laurie’s mother, is principally involved in assessing the people around her to be trustworthy, assuming that, in and of itself, the process by which she intrinsically does so is effective. And since she raised Laurie, she has a certain belief in herself to have done so effectively too, so much so that Laurie wouldn’t lie to her, but moreover, that Laurie would never be a Charles figure in the first place. In this way, it seems that competence and awareness of competence, begets gullibility. The competent conceive, build, revise, and take pride, faith, but most importantly, comfort in the fact that their competence produced more competence. And when they do, they create assumptions that leave themselves gullible to deception.