Reading Time: 1 Min.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Villager’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story explores themes of identity, longing, and the human desire to escape reality. In the story, a woman who moved to New York with dreams of becoming a professional dancer visits an apartment to buy some furniture, and ends up briefly assuming the identity of another woman. Summary Miss Clarence is about thirty-five years of age, living in Greenwich Village in New York City. She had come to the city twelve years earlier with dreams of becoming a dancer, but her ambition came to nothing. Instead, having taken a job as a stenographer (writing shorthand) for a coal company, she now works there as a private secretary. She has her own apartment but there is a clear sense that her life is too mundane and unsatisfactory for her. Responding to an advertisement in the Villager (a local Greenwich Village newspaper), she visits an apartment to enquire about buying some furniture from the owners, a Mr and Mrs Roberts. When she arrives at the apartment, she finds a note on the door informing her that Mrs Roberts has had to pop out for a short while but will be back in just over an hour, at three-thirty, but giving Miss Clarence permission to browse the furniture inside until Mrs Roberts gets back. Miss Clarence does so, and deduces several things about the couple who live there. She has already decided not to buy any of the furniture, but something compels her to remain in the apartment and look around. She is fairly dismissive of the apartment, but she gradually realises Mr Roberts is an artist, while it’s suggested from a book of dance photographs which the couple own that Mrs Roberts is a dancer, much as Miss Clarence herself dreamed of becoming. Miss Clarence performs a dance posture and discovers it isn’t as easy to execute as it used to be, and makes her shoulders hurt. When the telephone rings, Miss Clarence answers it and speaks to Mr Roberts – […]
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