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O. Henry - The Story Behind The Gift Of The Magi - Christmas Special!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver.  We’re here to read works that have changed the world and have changed us.

I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  If you’re listening to this in real time, we are in the second week of December 2020- and have just finished the excrutiatingly brutal book Wuthering Heights.  So, as a sorbet to our spirits, for the next three weeks we will be doing a little light reading with traditional Christmas narratives.  This week we are going to feature O Henry and his wildly popular short story “The Gift of the Magi”.  Next week we feature “A Visit from St Nicholas” or better known as “Twas The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore (both American authors, btw), and finally, the week of Christmas we will rebroadcast our analysis of the Sacred Text from the book of Luke in the KJV of the Bible. 

But before we get into O Henry’s plot-twisting life story- let’s remind you that it is the month of giving- and we would like to give to you, our listeners, by featuring and promoting your small business on our social media platforms.  Send us a picture of your shop, café, restaurant, school, whatever you do, we want to give you a shout out-wherever you live in our world.  During this season of worldwide struggle, let’s help each other out by recognizing those so make our individual communities unique and identifiable - each as best we can.

Well, highlighting working community builders is certainly in the spirit of O Henry.  This famous short story illustrates this a little but the larger body of work by O Henry definitely features the working man- he identified with many of us and spoke to and for us- I guess this was a reason for his crazy success- but before we let loose and venture into the hills of North Carolina to meet the young Will Porter (and yes, his name wasn’t actually O Henry- let me ask all of you, if you’ve enjoyed our work, please continue to support us by sharing an episode of ours with a friend, visiting us on our social media and or giving us a rating.  It really helps us grow. 

And now- after all of that ado- let’s chat about O Henry or, as he was born into this world William Sidney Porter on September 11, 1862. 

Not an awesome time to be born in the United States of America- for one thing, we were still in the throws of the American Civil War.  There were massive casualities on both sides and no end in sight.  But there were other deadly forces moving across the world, and not just in the United States and Europe namely and in this case- Tuberculosis- a deadly terrifying life-threatening plague- as it still is today in much of the world.  At the time of O Henry’s birth it was more deadly than even the Civil War, (today it is still in the top ten killers on planet earth and has killed more humans on earth than any other single disease- but in O Henry’s day it was killing 1 of 7 people living in the United States- something we also saw in the Poe episodes.  At that time there was no known cure.  There was nothing anyone felt they do about this illness, and Porter’s mother died of it when he was 3 years old. 

Ironically, Will Porter’s Dad, was a doctor- except during the Civil War that meant a lot of work, but very little income.  No one had money and this included the Porters. Dr Porter moved in with his mother, so she could help him take care of his three boys.   But Dr. Porter had personal demons and soon became an alcoholic- a problem that would eventually get O Henry too.  But for his part, Little Will Porter did okay as a kid, his aunt provided for him a pretty impressive education.  He read a lot.  He worked as a pharmacist at a local pharmacy- normal stuff- his big change came at age 19 when he was invited to accompany a couple that was moving to Texas.  He was thrilled and embraced the change.  In fact, typical Texan-style- he learned the ways of cattle ranching and speaking Spanish!!!  Yeeehawww!!

And it seems Texas was a good spot for him.  He did well, in fact, he did well enough that by age 24 he was earning $100 a month working a job at the Texas Land Office.  And that meant he was well off enough to elope with the 19 year old Athol Estes.

Exciting as that plan sounds-  this is where things started to take a bit of a bad turn- no fault to Athol, I might add.  Sadly,she also had tuberculosis- which was why they had to elope- it seems, her parents didn’t feel comfortable with her getting married with this problem.  Anyway, here’s the short version, short, thereafter Will took a job at a bank.  His wife had two children, the first died within hours of his birth almost killing the mom, the second survived, but not without taking a toll on Athol’s health.  Between those two child births and the tuberculosis, she just couldn’t recover and the medical bills started piling up.  Porter, encouraged by his wife, still pursued his writing career, while also working at the bank.  He started his own news paper called the Rolling Stone- and wrote the articles for it- it was actually really popular- and Will was a really funny writer.  The paper was well-received and sold well- but not well enough..the paper lost money.  So, here’s how Will found himself- he was bleeding money with the newspaper.  He was bleeding money with Athol’s medical bills-and then there was an incident at the bank which resulted in a problem that would define him for the rest of this life.  In 1894, an examiner found a shortage in his bank register.  To this day, no one really knows what actually happened to that money- but it was missing.

Well, it’s understandable why he would be stealing money.  But it’s also very conceavable that someone else did as well.  At this time period especially in places like Texas, the supervision at banks was more akin to turning in money in a middle school on field day- chaotic and unsupervised- it was very common in fact- for people to borrow money from the register if they needed it and then pay it back- no harm no foul was – and people just turned their head.  I’m just saying, he may have stolen the money, but it’s also not just entirely possible, but very easy to see how someone else could have done it- and absolutely no one would have known.

Well, it was quite shocking when they accuse Will.  He had an absolutely inpeccable reputation.  Everyone loved him and no one thought he would do such a thing.  The idea that Will Porter would embezzle thousands of dollars was shocking- even to him- When he was accused of embezzling the $4,702.94- he panicked, guilty or not, though, he gots on a train from Houston to Austin (where he was supposedly going to visit his wife- she’d been staying with her parents since her illness had gotten so bad)- but never arrived at Austin- he changed directions headdd to New Orleans at first but eventually wound up in Honduras.  His plan was simple if not less than brilliant.  The plan seems to have been to stay there until the statute of limitations on embezzlement ran out.

Not the most well-thought out plan- apparently- he did write Athol and tried to convince her to move to Honduras- but she was very sick.  It  just was  not physically possible for her to do something like that.  In fact, she was going to die.  When he understood this was the reality, To his kind-hearted credit, he came back to the US and was with her all the way to her death.  Right after that, though, he had to face the courts- and this is where historians really don’t agree on what to do with O Henry’s guilt.  Did he do it or not?  Henry claimed even in prison that he never stole it.  One time medicine went missing in the hospital where he worked in the prison.  They asked him if he took it and he said this, “I am not a thief and I never stole a thing in my life.  I was sent here for embezzling bank funds, not one cent of which I ever got.  Someone else got it and I am doing time for it.”  So who knows if he had a hand in the embezzlement or not.  It seems that courts were not totally convinced: The end result of his trial was that most of the charges were dropped, but he was still convicted of stealing $299.60- which isn’t near as large a sum of money as the original accusation- but there was still the problem that he fled.  He received the minimum sentence possible but on April 25, 1898, the day the Spanish-American war started- was also the day he started his five year sentence in the Ohio Penitentiary. 

This period in prison, it seems to me, is what changed Will Porter into O Henry, although he had used the pen name before, and although we haven’t brought it up yet- this whole time since arriving he Texas he had already done quite a considerable amount of writing – he’d even sold work to be nationally syndicated.  But- his time in prison changed the person of Will Porter- the man who went into that prison was not the man who came out.  For one thing, he had quite a bit of free time inside, and he used it to hone his skills.  It was in the penitentiary that he came up with his unique style – the which we’ll talk about here in a minute.  But he also comes up with a perspective. 

Well, as far as life in prison goes, he had it as good as you could have it.  He was immediately assigned to the prison hospital because of his experience as a pharmacist (know that that job didn’t require the years of education back then that it does today)- but he lived there- he ate and slept there- he was trusted as a bookkeeper (ironically)- so he was kept entirely away from the general population of prisoners and the harassment of the guards that was a common problem in the prison.  So, it was never the physical hardships of prison that got to him so bad- in fact, so badly that threatened suicide shorting after arriving.

No, first of all, it was the shame of being in prison.  And he was going to keep those years secret for the rest of his life.  But secondly, and I believe this is what fueled the endless stories he could come up with in his career after prison, as the pharmacist- he saw, new and listened to hundreds and hundeds of prisoners.  He heard their stories, saw how they were treated in an impersonal prison system, and this moved him.  This is a quote from a letter he wrote his father in law from prison, “There are four doctors and about 25 other men in the hospital force.  The hospital is a separate b uilding and is one of the finest equipped institutions in the country.  It is large and finely furnishes and has every appliance of medicine and surgery….the doctor goes to bed about 10 o’clock and from then on during the night I prescripbe for the patients myself and go out ant attend calls that come in.  If I find anyone seriously ill I have them brought to the hospital and attended to by the doctor.  I never imagined human life was held as cheap as it is here.  The mean are regarded as animals without soul or feeling….he then goes to describe the brutal living and working conditions of the inmates- their 13 hour days, the way they were viewed by the outside world and the institution at large compared to how he saw himself and the other men within the system.  O Henry gets out after 39  because of his impeccable behavior in prison.  The story goes that he told a fellow prison, “I will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls.”

Well, Will Porters starts over- at age 40 going to New York a town he would call “the four million”, an ex-con, a widower, his daughter living with her grandparents

-but this time he won’t be Will Porter- he is O Henry.  He won’t use that name until his gravestone, sadly only 9 years later. 

He lived in a cheap hotel.  He lived in a community he called “Baghdad by the Subway”- this is the material for all of his stories.  He wrote about the common person. In his writings he tells their stories. And this brings success.

 He said this, “I would like to live a lifetime on each street in New York.  Every house has a drama in it.” His first year he publishes 17 stories, but it won’t be long til he’s publishing 66 stories a year.  He makes money. He gives urban life- the kind that is so easy to dehumanize- a human  face.  The people in the tenement houses aren’t just dirty masses- they are individuals with stories, hearts, personalities.   

 He mae a name for himself and finally started making real money.  He started making $500 per story- that’s a long way from the $100 a month back in Texas.   But the drinking was a problem.  He was drinking at a rate of two bottles of whiskey per day!!  Nobody can sustain that.  It made him shiftless as an employee- he produced great stories, but they would be late, he’d be hard to track because he spent his days wandering the streets moving from one cheap hotel to another.  He really frustrated his bosses, one of which was Joseph Pulitzer. 

Late in 1905, O Henry agreed to write a Christmas story.  But he never got around to doing it.  The due date for the story came and went and no story-  the illustrator for the story trudged through snow to track down o Henry because he needed to get started.  O Henry said this, “I’ll tell you what to do, Colonel.  Just draw a picture of a poorly furnished room, the kind you find in a boarding house or rooming house over on the West Side.  In the room there is only a chair or two, a chest of drawers, a bed and a trunk.  On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side.  They are talking about Christmas.  The man has a watch fob in his hand.  He is plahing with it while he is thinking.  The girl’s principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back.  That’s all I can think of now.  But the story is coming.”  The illustrator took that, but the story never came…to the desperation of the editor.  It was just a few hours before the absolute deadline.  O Henry told the editor to lie down.  He pulled out a bottle of scotch and three hours later delivered “The Gift of the Magi.”  It has been reprinted in magazines every year for the last 115 years. 

Well, not just that.  It’s inspired countless movies- there’s a muppet version, a sesame street version, a mickey mouse version, a Rugrats version, a SNL version and that’s just here in the US- there’s even a Family guy parody.  Internationally it’s been translated into languages and cultures all over the world- those that celebrate Christmas and those that don’t.

Well, before we read this ubiquitous Christmas story, we should finish out the story of O Henry’s short life which is so many ways mirrors a lot of his stories.  One of the key features of O Henry’s stories is their dependence on irony and surprise endings.  He was known for this.  Yet, the real irony is that he spent lots of energy keeping his life a secret while writing stories that were often based in fact, sometimes autobiographical. Not even his daughter knew until after his death that he was a convicted felon.  He never tried to clear his name.  He never wrote anything that resembled bitterness.  His stories weren’t known for their deep characterization or important complex themes- they were all plot.  They for formulaic; they were fun- he wanted to provide casual entertainment- and that was what he did.  He married again in 1907 to a childhood sweetheart, Sara Lindsey Coelman, he moved her and his daughter to live with him in New York.  He bought a really fancy house on Long Island as well as an apartment in Manhattan.  By this point he was making gobs of money, but spending it at a faster rate than he was making it.  He bought fancy clothes, he gave away money to poor people he ran into on the streets or in restaunts.  Sometimes beggars would approach him asking for pennies and he’d give them large wods of cash.  One critic called him, “gay, irresponsible, impudent, hoaxing; no writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been reading O Henry. What does a comment like that mean?  Do you think?

Well, it means he’s a genius, but like many geniuses not unhaunted. And the secrets or demons that were tormenting took a toll.   His marriage was short-lived.  Sara his ex-wife later said, “No one could manage that man, he was a law unto himself.”  In the summer of 1910, he collapsed in his hotel room.  A friend called an ambulance.  He checked himself into the hospital under the alias Will S. Parker.  He joked as they checked him in that he was going to die only worth 23 cents.  Right as he was losing consciousness he said this, “Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark.”  In the morning he died by cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes. 

And yet again- the final irony, after he died his reputation grew, his stories made a fortune for his wife and daughter.  Five million copies of his book sold, and 8 years after his death the Society of Letters and Arts established the O Henry Memorial- and began awarding prizes every year to the best writers of short stories in America or Canada.  The Society Sold to doubleDay the rights to publish the O Henry Prizes stoires, and the O Henry Prize has been award to writers ever year since  then.  In 2019 the O Henry Prize printed it’s 100th anthology of the year’s greatest short stories.  In his lifetime, O Henry wrote over 250 short stories.  Many critics have called them sentimental-and that’s not an unfair criticism- but most of us don’t care that they are.  That’s what we like about them.  Others have said he wrote to keep his spirits up- that may or may not be true- because no matter why he wrote them- they have kept all of our spirits up for over 100 years. 

In that spirit, let’s read The Gift of the Magi- it’s simple- the narrator is omniscient- there are only three characters- a man and his wife and a woman who cuts hair for a living.   The plot like many of his stories forms a cross-pattern- two people are following paths, the story will intersect, and these two characters cross paths.  This causes the story to have an unexpected twist and creates the big situational irony- remember that’s when a situation is the opposite of what the characters or even we’d expect.  So…look for it…it’s not easy to miss though in this one- so let’s go- this story is set in a New York City apartment on Christmas Eve. 

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Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol - Episode 2 - Ghosts, Innocence, Redemption And The Conclusion!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. This is our second episode discussing Charles Dickens and his classic Christmas tale, A Christmas Carol. Last episode we began our discussion talking a little bit about Dickens’ life and the early experiences in Victorian England that shaped his career and his understanding of the world in general- in particular, the year he spent at the age of 12 as an outcast on the streets of London working in a blacking factory. We talked about the governmental report on the conditions of the over 30,000 urban poor children that inspired the tale. Finally, we discussed the blended choice of genres in which he chose to communicate his message of social responsibility and personal redemption- a carol, in prose, as he called it, but also a ghost story- an unusual combination.  We ended where we want to start today, talking about the man who has charmed the world with his miserly ways, Ebenezer Scrooge.   

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Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol - Episode 1 - The Architect Of The Victorian Christmas!

/Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. If you are listening to this in real time, we are nearing the end of 2021, a year that has been lackluster by most measurements albeit an improvement to 2020.  Most of us began 2021 tucked away in quarantine. I was teaching on Zoom; Christy was meeting with only half of her students half the time on a hybrid schedule. No year, in my lifetime, has began in such a strange way.  In some ways, it felt that the Covid era would never end. 

And yet, here we are, celebrating the end of 2021 with family and friends. We started this end of year holiday season cooking turkey and ham for Thanksgiving dinner in our home- American staples. We have attended friendsgivings, Christmas parties and on December 23rd we will participate in another Memphis tradition that was suspended for the 2020 year, attending with most of our children: Anna, Lizzy, Ben and Rachel- Theater Memphis’ annual performance of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. For those who don’t know our family dynamic, we are a growing blended family. Anna and Lizzy have lived in Knoxville, TN for most this year as students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxviille. Ben and Rachel live her in Memphis, and Emily and Joel live in Atlanta with their three children- Selma, Polly and Ezra.   

I love Christmas. I love the food, decorating our home, visiting with friends, the special services at church- all of it.   

Well, I do too, but I will say, since marrying into the Shriver family, I have learned to take it to the next level.  Shriver’s are notable for their holiday passion- all holidays really but especially Christmas. I will also say, that before studying for this podcast, I had no idea so many of the Christmas traditions that we love so much we owe to Victorian England. 

Oh for sure, in fact, Christmas was not even a federal holiday in this country until 1870.  And even then it was an unpaid holiday. It didn’t become a paid holiday until 1938.   

Well, that is very Scroog-ish.   So, let’s talk about which Christmas traditions we inherited from Victorian England- many of which have found their way all around the globe.  You know, growing up in Brazil, just by nature of the weather we had different holiday traditions- we were in the Southern hemisphere, so instead of wishing for a white Christmas- we were always looking forward to heading to the beach after Christmas, but even in a climate with more palm trees than pine trees although, my friends parents were putting up little Christmas trees and other decorations- I emphasize little not because they were belittling the traditions but there was much more limited economic access ( remember Brazil in those days was a military dictatorship with high government control) but even as such- It’s interesting to see some of these same Victorian traditions.   

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Shirley Jackson - The Lottery - Her Most Famous Short Story!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver, and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

And I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to love Lit Podcast.  Today we are finishing up our series on Shirley Jackson.  Last week we concluded our discussion of her most famous book, the one that inspired the Netflix series by the same name The Haunting of Hill House.  Today we are going to read the short story that made her a household name, “The Lottery.” 

It has had its share of movie inspiration.  Anyone who has seen the opening of The Hunger Games would not be shocked at the plot of “The Lottery.”  It’s inspired a bunch of other stories and movies besides that one; I think you mentioned the Stephen King one last week.  I’m sure there are way more than that if we sat here and thought about it. 

True, and maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was actually surprised as to how scandalous this story was when it was first published.  If we’re talking solely about violence, by today’s standards, it’s mild.  There is no blood or gore, it’s definitely no Squid Games. 

I agree- and I believe that is why this story- so deceptively simple and relatively tame- is actually taught in the eight grade in many school systems.  It’s disturbing for reasons beyond the fact that someone is killed at the end- kiiling a main character is just par for the course in a standard English curriculum- in fact, that’s the big joke among English teachers- we don’t teach a story if we don’t kill someone at the end.  “The Lottery” reads and feels so simple.  And it is…so why the sensation?   

  Let’s talk about the sensation, it’s definitely worth noticing how big a stir it actually created. 

For starters, the story generated more negative letters and subscription cancellations than anything the New Yorker had ever published.  Jackson herself received over 300 letters just the summer it was published.  In her own words she said this, “I can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me.” 

I want to point out that her mother, the ever-inspiring Geraldine could be counted on for a comment.  She wrote her daughter with this to say, “Dad and I did not care at all for your story…it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days.  Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?” 

Dear Ole’ Geraldine- at least she’s consistent.  But Jackson refused to explain the meaning of the story.  She did once tell a journalist, “I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic demonstration of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their own lives, but I gather that in some cases the mind just rebels.  The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer at the end would amaze you.”   

Ha!  Well, I don’t know how pointless violence and general inhumanity could have surprised anyone in 1948 when it was published.  That was right after world war 2, especially the United States, had to stare the reality in the face that we had stood by and turned a blind eye for almost a decade to the atrocities committed by Hitler, and there was no one more cultured or sophisticated than the German people.  

I guess that’s true, but of course…for Americans that was always…over there…we, self-righteously could always claim we were not capable of such things... 

we after all were the victorious winners in that struggle between good and evil. And yet, Jackson’s simple story does seem to be pointing an accusing finger at someone. 

Yes, I totally think it does, and I do want us to take a different direction than many people who read this story.  At first pass, and this is how I’ve most often heard this story discussed, this is a story that rails against tradition, against not questioning authority, specifically religious authority, against patriarchy…all very easy things to attack and very common in the American canon. 

 Well, not just in the arena of literature either.  We’ve been attacking cultural norms in one form or another since American invented baseball as its own American sports ritual over the sport of the British Empire- football or better known here as soccer.  

HA!  I guess that’s true.  We also have a  way higher tolerance for gore than this story evokes- I mean we were comfortable with the headless horseman and the tell-tale heart.  There was something personal about the Lottery that went beyond attacking traditions or killing an innocent victim.    I also don’t think many of us would cancel our subscription to our favorite media streaming service (which would be the modern day equivalent), or take the trouble to dig up someone’s personal address and write them a personal letter if we did not feel personally attacked.  “The Lottery” got under people’s skins because it was personal.  So, that’s the question I want to ask?  If this story is about pointless violence and general inhumanity, and if I’m offended because I feel personally accused, how?   

So, let’s start- Christy, we talked about if we should read the entire story and then discuss it or if we should stop and start.  We’ve decided to stop and start, but hopefully we won’t stop and start too much to be confusing, but just enough to be helpful- a difficult balance to strike.   

True- Garry- we may fail, but let’s give it a go.  Let’s start with the first three paragraphs and then we’ll interrupt.  

Paragraphs 1-3 

What are your thoughts? 

Well, the thing that strikes me here is tone.  Look at the imagery and word choice- it’s summer, there is fresh warmth- there are flowers blooming- there’s not just grass there’s richly green grass- this is the language of birth and beauty.   There is also a deliberate attempt to characterize these people as organized and civilized- the lottery is annual, it takes less than two hours, they eat a noon dinner- the children don’t gather, they assemble- assemble is a formal word.  There is a reference to school. They are being instructed and civilized so to speak deliberately – the word “liberty” is thrown around here.  And yet what are they doing, they are stuffing their pockets full of stones- even the very small children.  They assemble as family units, the very bedrock of civilization across time and culture- they stand together- united- and for a purpose that is upsetting to no one. 

Let’s read the next four paragraphs and learn about the culture and traditions of this place. 

Next four paragraphs  

One funny thing that Jackson does in this story is play around with names.  The names are all carefully selected- look at who’s conducting all of this, a man by the name of Summers- such a happy name associated with youth, strength, growth, life, all of it.  But look at the other guy- Mr. Graves- he also is responsible for making up the slips of paper and putting the names in this black box.  It’s a pun- a grave is a place where we put a dead body. It also means serious- like if you are in grave danger.  The black box one time spent a year in Mr. Graves barn, but that’s not the only place it lives.  He is not solely responsible for this black box.  It’s spent a year in the post office and also in a grocery store owned by Mr. Martin.   

Another thing that people have pointed to is all the possible symbolism in this story.  It does seem that this box is a symbol, the three-legged stool is a symbol, the black mark is a symbol, even the stones are symbols.  But for what?  We should always annotate and follow the symbols, but I usually withhold judgement on what they mean until I’ve had time to think about the story as a whole.   

And we’ve got more names- a lot of names actually.  One that showed up earlier, but we didn’t address is name Delacroix- we’re even told the correct pronunciation of this name-  

Dela-Croix- as in French for of the Cross 

Yep- except they mispronounce it- they don’t say Delacroix like you’re supposed to say it- they say delacroy- a corruption of the original.  And that sets up for me another a pattern that I see as you read through all these traditions.  Traditions are not fixed- like people think they are.   

No, They evolve like everything else on planet earth.  We keep what we want and discard what we don’t like.  On my wall, I have a poster that says all behavior is goal- directed- and that goes for entire cultures as well.  No matter what we say, our behaviors speak for us- and they are all goal-directed.  This is true for traditions as well- be it religious, ethical, or civic. 

Jackson is very ambiguous about her relationship with religion here.  I want to point out that this is not a religious ceremony, and she could have very easily and understandably made it one.  Mr. Summers could have been Pastor Summers or Father Summers or Rabbi Summers, but he’s not any of these, he’s a businessman.  I want to suggest what I think here about-that three legged stool- I do think it represents what holds up society in general-  three aspects of societal authority or control- religious, civic and commercial- these three legs hold up the black box.  They are working together, but none is running the show exclusively.   

Well, if we’re going to guess at symbolism, I want to make a suggestion of my own. 

Oh-okay- what do you want to suggest? 

That black box.  It’s power, it’s control.  It’s black because fear controls.  It’s dynamic in that it moves.  It evolves over time, as power does.  It’s cloaked in secrecy, it hides behind tradition, but we see that that isn’t necessarily true- they went from chips to paper when they wanted to.  What they wanted to uphold was the black box of power.  I also want to point out that somehow Jackson subtly connects her ritual with this black box and three-legged stool to the harvest, which I found to be a particularly interesting connection.  It’s a link to survival and it’s at the heart of human existence.  The ancient Athenians, the Aztecs, the Incans on this side of the world just to name a few, but many cultures have connected human sacrifice to crop fertility. In fact, and this may be a point of irony, if you just look across human history from the Egyptians to the Chinese, what we see is human sacrifice correlates directly with a rise in a more sophisticated culture and social stratification than the other way around, contrary to what Old Man Warner suggests.   

What do you mean by that? 

I mean that we can see, historically, as societies got more sophisticated and organized, we saw more and more links to human sacrifice.  

Well You’re right  That is counter-intuitive- you would think it would be just the opposite.  Of course, closer to home, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is what Jackson was most familiar with and what is reflected most obviously in her story, there is a very deep tradition of sacrifice but not human.  This story is not a direct attack on Christianity by the way, but there is a lot of Christian imagery here- not just with the name Delacroix or delacroy.   There is also the connection with publicly sanctioned and even religiously sanctioned public stonings.  This is a ritual we see in the Old Testaman of the Bible, and one we see Jesus referencing directly in the New Testament in the Bible.  There is a particular story, one of the more famous stories in the New Testament from the 8th chapter of Saint John where a group of men want to stone a woman because they caught her in the act of adultery.  They take her outside; they all gather stones and are ready to murder her when Jesus intervenes.  He takes a stick and starts writing something in the sand which we are never told what they are,  but he famously says, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”  The men slowly but surely as they read whatever he was writing, dropped their stones and went home.  Of course, we don’t know what he wrote, I like to think it was the names of their paramours, but that’s just me enjoying the irony.  The story ends with Jesus looking at the woman and asking where her accusers had gone because by that point there were none left. 

So, you see that story connecting here-  

Yep- I do.  There are more Christian references too- Mrs. Adams, that’s the name of the first man.  There is an Eva- and then Old man Warner- his name isn’t Biblical but there’s a biblical connection.  Again, back to Jesus in the New Testament.   These Biblical references, btw, are not obscure- these are super-famous passages that every red-blooded American in 1950 would know.  In the New Testament there’s another story where  a follower of Jesus asks Jesus how many times a person was responsible for forgiving another person- the follower offered a suggestion- he said, should we forgive a person seven times- something he finds to be generous- to which Jesus responded- you should forgive a person 70 times 7 – I think what is important about Old Man Warner is not his name but his age- and the link to this archetypal number.   

What’s the connection- I don’t think this story is talking about adultery or forgiveness,  is it? 

Not directly, it’s talking about values and core values and hypocrisy for sure- and we’ll flesh it out when we get to the end, but what I want to point out- is that people have somehow found their value in surviving this tradition.  Mr. Warner brags that he’s survived 77 of these without getting picked- his importance comes from this.  Warner also makes a claim that is literally a great example of a post hoc fallacy- an error in logic which you believe that just because something comes before something it means that thing necessarily causes it- he is literally saying that the harvest comes as a direct result of the lottery.  He doesn’t invoke any diety for believing this- he just throws it out there.    He’s resistant to change because he’s validated by this social order. 

Well, I can see why lot’s people think this story is about accepting things just because they have always been done.  Warner clearly makes that argument. 

Of course, that’s obvious and there- it’s just not the heart of the story.  I want to bring up one more name before we finish and get to the punch line.  The name Tessie Hutchinson- if we look to history there is one Hutchinson woman who stands out- Anne Hutchinson- she showed up in chapter 1 of the Scarlet Letter too- btw- which has a connected theme to this story- 

 but anyway- tell us who this person is- for those less familiar with early American history. 

Anne Hutchinson- we’re going way back now- she was born in 1591- she was banished to the  colony of Rhode Island after being excommunicated from Massachusetts bay colony for teaching among other things that women should read and be in leadership but mostly her teachings about the Bible were considered heretical.   She ended up being murdered by Indians in 1643.  It’s a sad ending.  She was definitely cast out of the group.   

So, let’s finish reading the story, and see where we land with all these ideas swirling around in our heads.   

Finish the story 

Well, Mrs. Hutchinson doesn’t win a Bendix washer.  You know  the psychologist Carl Jung, as you know I like his work, stated that even more or less civilized people remain inwardly primitive.  We don’t like thinking this, so we can justify with this “mass psyche”.  The group becomes the hypnotic focus of fascination and we can allow ourselves to fall into some sort of spell.- that’s the word he used.  The group experience lowers the level of consciousness like the psyche of an animal so we don’t have to take responsibility for our actions on an individual level.  It’s not a murder if it’s a ritual.  How could it be? It’s sanctioned by the group. 

And yet, it is murder, isn’t.  And where I see all of Jackson’s ambiguities emerge.  Her story can be interpreted so many different ways. For one thing, no one sees any moral conflict.  Any psychological explanation for that.  I mean they do this every year. 

Talk aboou the Milgram experiment 

 It’s a nameless village, full of tradition, likely corruption, so civilized, so warm, the people were so nice to each other…all the way until Mrs. Delacroix picks up the largest stone she could find with which to pelt her good friend Mrs. Hutchinson.   

Jackson downplayed her story.  In an essay she wrote about it she had this to say, “I had written the story three weeks before being published.  The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller- it was as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries- and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story, at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and writing the story I foud that it went quicly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause, I’ll skip a little to we get to this line….it was just a story I wrote.” 

Except it wasn’t.  It was her lived experience in Bennington.  Everyone was so nice to each other; centered on civic contribution, religion, family structure- and yet ready to pelt each other with the largest stone they could find, given the psychological pass to do so with impunity. 

And that’s what made people angry.  We are nice people, but we’re not kind people.  We are civilized, but we are not forgiving.  We are religious but our religion has been molded not out of the old sacred texts, but out of the box of power that sits on that three legged stool of our conveniently created social structures remolded over the years as it goes from house to house.  We are not good, we are what we always have been- ready not just to hurl that first stone, but ready to bring out children along, get them to fill up their pockets with stones, all on a beautiful summer day.   

Wow!  That hurts.  Well, we hope you enjoyed our discussion of one of America’s most famous short stories.  Next week, we will find the anecdote to such raw exposure to humanity through the writings of another American native son- Walt Whitman and selections from his wonderful masterpiece- Leaves of Grass.  We hope you stick around to see what that great American has to say.  As always, please support us by pushing us out on your social media- facebook, instsagram, twitter, tiktok and/or linked in.  Text an episode to a friend.  If you are a teacher, visit our website www.howtolovelitpodcast.com to find listening guides to all of our episodes.   

Peace out 

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