Queer Desires in “The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”

Abstract

Shirley Jackson’s 1949 collection The Lottery and Other Stories contains a kaleidoscope of tales—including the canonical titular piece—in which the quotidian banality is quixotically subverted to critique the precarity of heteronormativity. By exploring two stories among them—“The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”—this essay unveils the embryonic lesbian desires and repairs the overlooked queer lacunae lurking within the familiar. “The Daemon Lover” has a simple plot. The unnamed protagonist—a woman in her thirties—wakes up on the day of her wedding, and drinks coffee while expecting the return of her fiancé, James Harris. After a tedious wait, she roams the neighborhood dizzily and frantically trying to hunt down Harris. Her quest ends at an empty apartment, where eerie laughter can be heard from the inside and no one comes to answer the door. According to Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson in her notes written at Syracuse University alludes to “a shadowy figure that had begun to appear to her, either in a dream or in a vision ... a figure that would eventually take form in her mind as the demon lover” (48). This elusive figure vacillates between the tangible and the immaterial, “imbued with the ability to fill up an aching void, never directly seen, rarely even directly alluded to” (48–49). Jackson invents a peripatetic heroine traversing a defamiliarized neighborhood and tenaciously chasing after an insubstantial lover, while letting go of the necessity for any hetero-romantic closure. The story’s atmosphere is psychedelia for it is focalized through the protagonist’s excessively caffeinated mind. It is vaguely hinted that Harris is an illusion fabricated by the woman’s hallucination. When she arrives at Harris’ supposedly “right” address, she realizes that “she had never been here before ... and Jamie’s name was not on any of the mailboxes in the vestibule” (Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” 14). Paradoxically, certain locals claim to have somehow encountered him. Thus, Harris embodies a partial visibility with his intermittent emergences. This https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919