Shirley Jackson’s story ‘After you, my dear Alphonse’ is full of insufficient, incomplete otherings. The most conspicuous of these is a white woman’s (Mrs. Wilson) overdetermined, racist othering of her son’s black friend Boyd. The disquieting effect of the story—because it is a Shirley Jackson story after all—comes from the juxtaposition of this prejudiced ‘psychic assault’ (Foster 451) with Mrs. Wilson’s best intentions and hostly courtesy. She tries her utmost to welcome and “help” her son’s friend, but lurking between and within the gracious mannerisms is a white-hot violence which denies Boyd his own self, through a misrecognition in the eyes of Mrs. Wilson. To read this story deconstructively, then—seeking the lost, deferred meanings between words—is to recognise Boyd as an Other, and an Other who has been wronged by the very people who sought to do right by him.
‘After You, My Dear Alphonse’ is a story about race, othering and action. Two boys, one white and one black, continually repeat the phrase “after you, my dear Alphonse” to each other, a reference to the comic strip Alphonse and Gaston by Frederick Burr Opper which features a pair of Frenchmen so excruciatingly polite that neither will act before the other, resulting in a stalemate of inaction. The boys similarly defer to each other in (what at first seems to be) a playful way, and it is Mrs. Wilson, the mother of the white boy Johnny, who brings action to the scene, demanding Johnny come inside for lunch, that he and Boyd sit down, and so on.
Mrs. Wilson is positioned as a racist, albeit a well-meaning one. The first thing she notes as Johnny brings his friend Boyd in for lunch is that Boyd is ‘a Negro boy’, (85) and then procedes to make a host of unfounded, stereotyping assumptions about him, including: that the wood he is carrying is Johnny’s and that Johnny made him carry it, that his father is a manual labourer, that his mother has to work in addition to child rearing, and that he is poor and requires her charity.
This might suggest a binary opposition between Mrs. Wilson’s relationship with Boyd as other, and that with Johnny as an extension of herself. This opposition in the story aligns with another opposition of politeness and vulgarity: Mrs. Wilson’s tone with her son is familiar and impolite, and she is often chiding him for things he is doing wrong. Similarly, Johnny’s tone with his mother is casual and crude: he tells his mother to wait when she calls him, ‘yell[s]’ in the house, and speaks ‘through a mouthful of eggs’. Mrs. Wilson’s interactions with Boyd on the other hand are almost absurdly formal in comparison: she greets him with a “how do you do, Boyd?”—returning his own very formal greeting—she ‘hesitates’ when asking him a question, and describes his sister as having “a very fine attitude”. The magnitude of this difference in register is indicative of something ‘screwy’.
The main sense of unease, however, comes from a deconstruction which occurs in the text. Joan Wylie Hall notices that the titular mantra of the boys ‘is relevant to the exaggerated civility with which Mrs. Wilson addresses Boyd.’ (25) The boys can then be seen to mock Mrs. Wilson, and people like her, who falsely think themselves above ‘a certain view held by certain people:’ colour prejudice. (Fanon 83) Frantz Fanon documents these utterances of false consciousness: “‘Understand, my dear boy, colour prejudice is something I find utterly foreign … But of course, come in, sir, there is no colour prejudice among us … Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves … It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are …’” (Fanon 80) Taken in their unlikely conjunction, their graceful warmth is magnified and focussed to a point of burning white light. Hidden within the surface gentility is a hostile terrain.
As children parrot the adults around them, they often reveal, through excessive repetition, the hidden double meanings in their speech; deconstruction is here at work. Boyd’s polite ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Wilson’ is playfully repeated by Johnny: ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Wilson, no, thank you, Mrs. Wilson, no, thank you, Mrs. Wilson’. (87) Johnny’s inane repetition amplifies Boyd’s politeness toward his mother, until a ridiculous, uncomfortable note is heard. This time, Mrs. Wilson does not scold her son; something has been uncovered.
There is a brokenness in the text, indeed a brokenness in the language used between Mrs. Wilson and Boyd which has been noticed by Johnny. It is his preoccupation with the formality between his friend and his mother which produces these broken utterances of his own—perhaps this is also the source of the boys’ mantra-game. This textual corruption points inward to a corruption of its referent: the social. It is the othering of Boyd by Mrs. Wilson which is unbalanced and unstable. To understand this more, we need some theoretical assistance.
In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sets out to discover how it is that a human comes to possess consciousness of itself as a self—something non-human animals lack. His answer to this is of course dialectical, and indeed he shifts the goal posts into the receding horizon: we progress in stages of self-consciousness toward that full self-consciousness that was posited in the initial formulation.
The first movement Hegel identifies is the splitting of ‘pure self-consciousness’ (115) that occurs upon the confrontation with something that is not itself. It is here that we get the two modes, or pre-forms, or self-consciousness which he calls being-for-itself and being-for-others. This is the unresolved, asymmetric relationship between master and slave (‘lord’ and ‘bondsman’ in the translation below):
‘Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman.’ (115)
It is here that power enters the mix—foreshadowed by Hegel’s choice of terms. The master and slave only fall into the relationship they do because of a real power imbalance in a fight to the death. Rather than face death, the weaker of the two will subordinate itself to the other, granting it recognition and service.
However, a curious reversal in power occurs between master and slave, due to the slave’s proximity to work which provides the missing component (being-for-self) needed in order for them to sublate their position:
‘Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is. … [W]ork forms and shapes … something permanent. … It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.’ (118 emphasis in original)
The master is without a freely given recognition or a concrete tether to the material (the permanent), and so is denied self-consciousness. For them to progress to a fuller stage of self-consciousness requires that they recognise the slave as an Other, an independent Self not infinitely penetrable by their acts of knowing, not existing merely to satisfy their needs.
Thus,
‘[s]elf-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [in] the process of Recognition.’ (111)
It is this properly dialectical Othering which is conspicuously absent in Jackson’s story. There is no respect for the independent position, make-up, interests and actions of the Other, instead he is reduced to a pre-known puppet or avatar.
Even while Boyd attempts to assert his Self—through his father (“My father eats anything he wants to”) or his ‘puzzled expression’ to Mrs. Wilson’s charity—by virtue of the skin-deep schema of racialisation which operates through her on him, he is brusquely reprimanded for not playing his racial part properly. Mrs. Wilson snatches the gingerbread away ‘just as Boyd was about to take another piece’, and, true to her role as matriarch of the house, she is not ‘angry, … just disappointed’. (89)
This inability for the roles of master and slave to be sublated is particular to a colonial or postcolonial society. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon states that:
‘As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of ‘being for others’, of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonised and civilised society. … The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.’ (77–8)
It is because the black man is ‘overdetermined from without’ that he is ‘denied the slightest recognition.’ (81–2) And this is exactly what happens to Boyd in the story. Mrs. Wilson brings her prejudiced assumptions about what ‘a Negro boy’ is (note: not what ‘a Negro boy’ should be, but in fact is) and thus he remains an unrecognised object in her consciousness. Boyd is boxed-in by a white ontology, constantly driven out of any selfhood which he might call his own: ‘The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position.’ (Fanon 95)
The boys ultimately dismiss the actions of Johnny’s mother. Johnny disregards his mother as ‘screwy’, Boyd agreeing that his mother can be likewise. The story ends with Boyd ‘hesitat[ing]’, then returning to the mantra, “After you, my dear Alphonse.”
It is this return to the same stalemate which indicates the absence of a dialectical movement between any of the characters. Boyd, though, is left with a residue: “Is your mother still mad?” he asks Johnny ‘in a low voice.’ Frances Smith Foster identifies his interaction with Mrs. Wilson as a ‘psychic assault’, (451) in resonance with Fanon’s focus on the impacts of racism on the black psyche in Black Skin White Masks. She encourages a political lesson from Jackson’s story:
‘We embody and enact points of views inherent in our gender, class, sexuality, age, etc. We know that narratives are personal and the stories we tell tell who we are. In short, we know we are “Other” to others and they to us.’ (452)
Foster recognises that ‘Mrs. Wilson's problem … was in failing to process the unexpected expeditiously’; her rigid, static self/other schema is not properly dialectical, making it impossible for her to recognise Boyd as Black Other.
Foster evokes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘politics of the open-end’ when she says:
‘We all have some Mrs. Wilson in us, and we know what we know or think we know, but we must be open to—even expect—the unexpected or inexplicable answers and not get mad, not silence it, but recalibrate.’ (455)
It is not insignificant that deconstruction is the tool that aids us in this. Indeed, Derrida says: ‘Deconstruction is … an openness towards the other.’ (Derrida 173)
* * *
“After you, my dear Alphonse” derives its aesthetic sense of unease through an autodeconstruction of certain binary oppositions we take for granted: self/other, polite/vulgar, adult/child. Through following the movements of this deconstruction, we can apply a postcolonial reading to determine exactly what is deficient about the representation of these binaries in the story, and how these deficiencies are mirrored in the real world, taking lessons from this analysis for our own life.
‘It was Shirley’s genius to be able to paint homey, familiar scenes like this, and then imbue them with evil—or, more correctly, allow a reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along.’ (Oppenheimer 101)
Derrida, Jacques. “Deconstruction and the Other.” Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Richard Kearney, New York UP, 1995, pp. 107–26.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Paladin, 1968.
Foster, Frances Smith. “‘After you, my dear Alphonse;’ Or, when politeness and good intentions are not enough.” Atlantic Studies, no. 18, vol. 4, 2021, pp. 450-9, doi:10.1080/14788810.2020.1865015.
Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. Gale, 1993.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold Vincent Miller, Oxford UP, 1977.
Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery and Other Stories. Penguin Classics, 2009.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999.