A Summary and Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Villager’

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 – ‘Artie’ – who had hoped to speak to his wife. He tells Miss Clarence that he has been invited to go to Paris, presumably to pursue his career as an artist, so that is why they are selling the furniture. He asks her to let his wife know that he telephoned. It is also strongly suggested that the husband and wife are breaking up, since Mrs Roberts is not following her husband to Paris but is going back to live with her parents.

Shortly after this, a young man named Harris arrives at the apartment, also to browse the furniture for sale. Harris mistakes Miss Clarence for Mrs Roberts, the owner, and Miss Clarence pretends to be Mrs Roberts, referring to herself as a dancer and referring to ‘her’ husband by the familiar name, ‘Artie’, to make the lie more convincing.

The young man confides that he has dreams of becoming a writer, but he leaves after examining the furniture, having failed to find anything he wants to buy. Miss Clarence ends up leaving the apartment five minutes before Mrs Roberts is due back, but leaves a note for her claiming she had stayed until three-thirty. She goes back to her apartment, her shoulder aching from the dance move she had attempted at the Roberts’ apartment.

Analysis

Jackson’s story explores several thought-provoking themes, including the longing to escape one’s own mundane, unremarkable life and failed aspirations. Miss Clarence may not wish to buy Mrs Roberts’ furniture, but she seizes upon the opportunity to borrow the other woman’s life temporarily, presenting herself as Mrs Roberts to Mr Harris.

But Shirley Jackson layers her story with delicate ironies and subtle details which thematically echo each other, and it is significant that Harris’s passing remark to Miss Clarence – that he is in search of a wife – is made to a woman who is presenting herself as a woman whose marriage is, we assume, virtually over. Just as Mr Roberts became a successful artist with the help of a supportive wife to nurture his talent (and furnish and maintain the house), so Mr Harris is after the same.

The irony, of course, is that Miss Clarence fails to realise that the woman whose identity she is stepping into, believing the other woman’s life to be more glamorous and successful than her own, is actually as failed as hers: Mrs Roberts is about to return to her parents’ home, her own home having failed with only the furniture left in the hollow shell of the marital home.

In this connection, we might bear in mind another minor detail whose significance it would be easy to overlook. When she is exploring the Roberts apartment, Miss Clarence notes the stove has never been cleaned and the couple don’t do much cooking, nor does Mrs Roberts make her husband coffee in the morning. This may be one reason why her domestic setup has crumbled: her artist husband wants a wife to do everything for him, and the would-be dancer, Mrs Roberts, was unwilling to be the stay-at-home wife for him.

In other words, if Miss Clarence envies the other woman’s success as a dancer and her married life, the story drops some strong hints that both of these supposed successes are as false and empty – as much of a sham – as Miss Clarence’s own brief pretence as Mrs Roberts.

The Character of Miss Clarence

Miss Clarence is delineated as a complex character in just a few pages of text, showing Shirley Jackson’s skill at characterisation. Although she is initially disdainful of the Roberts’ apartment and their furniture, she is fickle enough to alter her view of them when she realises – rightly or wrongly, from a book of dance photographs – that the woman of the house is herself a dancer, much as Miss Clarence set out to become.

That she can change her mind so quickly based on one deduced detail – going from slightly smug superiority to a desire to inhabit the other woman’s life, albeit only to a stranger for a brief while – suggests a woman who is unhappy with her own life, and thus constantly looking for ways to remind herself of her own superiority (however hollow the reasons) and to other lives into which she can escape (however falsely).

Although Mr Harris’ mistaken identification of her with Mrs Roberts happens by chance, the signs that Miss Clarence already wants to assume Nancy Roberts’ identity are already there: although she hesitated for a minute before answering the Roberts’ telephone, she did nevertheless answer it in their absence.

In a sense, she is already seeking to assume the role of the woman of the house through doing so, and the oddness of her doing this is not lost on Arthur Roberts, when she picks up the phone: he, not Mr Harris, is the first man in the story to confuse her with Nancy Roberts (‘When she said hello a man’s voice said, “Nancy?”’). This is another subtle hint that Jackson provides which prefigures Miss Clarence’s later actions.