An argument could be made the driving theme of this story is not fear, but in fact humor and good natured fun at the games children can play and make up. The dramatic irony at the end of the story of course implies Laurie has been Charles and vice versa. Yet it is telling the story is told from the perspective of Laurie’s mother who, like the protagonist in The Daemon Lover, is nameless. She is simply the mother of Laurie and given no other identity. The only names given are Laurie and Charles; this is a world dominated by the needs of children and their centralization of their parents, despite this being told from their perspective. The mother’s preoccupation with Charles, and eventually the mother, reveals her own anxieties about motherhood. When she reveals her plans to find Charles’s mother at the PTA meeting, her husband replies with, “Ask her what happened to Charles” (95). This implies Charles’s behavior must be a result of some environmental trauma. While we don’t know the nature of Laurie’s family outside this story, his parents involvement in his life and their encouragement of his schooling and storytelling is indicative of a positive home environment. Roberta Rubenstein discusses Jackson’s relationship with the family structure in her essay “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters” and briefly talks about the way Jackson writes of children: “the doting if unorthodox mother regards her children, albeit genially, as savages and demons” (311). Though she is speaking of a specific work of Jackson’s, this applies to “Charles” as well, highlighting the savage parts of childhood, under the guise of “kids will be kids.” Rubenstein goes on to say, “Jackson represents her own far darker relational anxieties from not only maternal but a filial perspective” (311).

     This anxiety is especially true when Laurie’s mother looks for Charles mother at the PTA meeting. “At the meeting I sat restlessly, scanning each comfortable matronly face, trying to determine which one hid the secret of Charles. None of them looked matronly enough. No one stood up in the meeting and apologized for the way her son had been acting. No one mentioned Charles” (96).

     It is a moment of empathy in the narrator, yet she also places judgement on the nonexistent mother. The mother must be exhausted having to deal with a child like that, but she has an obligation to the other mothers to explain herself. There is almost a sense of relief as Laurie’s mother speaks of Charles’s mother, happy she is not in her position. The story ends with the revelation that Laurie is Charles, so the reader can only imagine how the mother feels not only about her son’s behavior, but her role as a mother and how she failed. The abrupt ending is common in Jackson’s work. “...endings seem curiously incomplete, as if Jackson has chosen to terminate her narratives abruptly and arbitrarily with some degree of irony and ambiguity” (Hague 81).

     The irony, as stated, is in plot but in the maternal role that has been presented. The fact this is a nameless mother completely fixated on a misbehaved boy and his mother shows her own fascination and preoccupation of maternity itself. The irony then is that perhaps her problem is beyond her control, something she had previously thought to maintain (and implied by the fact she is in control of the narration in the story). Jackson is thus providing a fear in the unknown qualities of parenthood; the anxiety a woman can feel by realizing she is not in control of her own child, particularly at the beginning of kindergarten, a pivotal moment in both the child’s life and the mother’s, as the reader can assume these are the first moments of releasing their kid into a place they cannot be present. While seemingly about the innocence of a young boy’s imagination, Shirley Jackson is highlighting the anxieties of motherhood.