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Study 163 - The Beautiful Stranger (Patreon)

Published:
2026-04-16 21:26:55
Imported:
2026-04
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When a woman's husband is replaced by an exact replica, she doesn't really mind -- it's The Beautiful Stranger, another masterpiece from Shirley Jackson's collection Dark Tales.

Special thanks to reader Rachel Lackey of Rachel Watches Star Trek!

Next up: Shirley Jackson's Home as well as Extra Credit on witchcraft!

Comments

Newk

I was absolutely waiting for Chad to say "I'm sorry Ms Jackson, I am for real" but it didn't happen. I even thought Chris was setting it up for him

Raymond Hill

This story reminds me of the great 2014 movie The One I Love with Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss (who actually played Shirley Jackson in the biopic Shirley). In it, a couple in a rocky relationship visits a cabin in the woods where each encounters an idealized version of the other. That’s the most I can give without spoilers, but suffice to say that it’d make a great bonus episode.

Matt & Hannah White

It’s kinda sad how excited I was to get the callout on this episode. Forget the birth of my kids, I have a new core memory.

Stacey Cahan

I feel like this story could be read in conversation with Nightbitch: the alienation of being a stay-at-home mother. In the case of Jackson's POV character, the otherness is externalized, transforming her husband and eventually her home into something foreign. In the case of Nightbitch, the POV character herself is transformed.

MortalGlare

This was easily one of my stand-out favourite episodes in the last while, you guys were really on fire for this one. The strength of the story, your back and forth as both of you picked up different concepts from the same sections, really just a perfect example of just why i've loved this show for so many years.

Alex Liggett

What an amazing story, and a really insightful discussion - great job guys. My wife has a story of experiencing something like a fugue state. While she was studying in the US she slept in her car in a carpark in a small town one night while driving from Colorado to Texas. She woke up in the morning having no idea where she was, where she was heading or why she was sleeping in a car in in a foreign country. She is a cool customer, and rather than blindly panic as I definitely would have, she headed out to the highway, picked a direction and just drove. She says that as she went along she slowly came to her senses. She has never been clear on whether she realised at some point that she was heading the wrong way and had to turn around. The mind is scarily fragile sometimes.

Aaron La Vene

What if he started being nice because he could tell she was losing her mind? Maybe she’s never expressed interest in going on a trip with him and he has wanted her too in the past? So he was taken aback. And then when she looked at him like he was a stranger, maybe to him she looked like she was losing it and she was being strange and so he began to placate her. Maybe that shelf was the entire reason for their argument. Maybe she wanted that shelf and he was the one told say no they can’t afford it, and that caused her to cry. By the end she has clearly lost sight of reality. Maybe he was trying to prevent this? I don’t think so. But an interesting way to interpret it.

Corey Wittig

Every week, more factoids about Austin Powers! (Of course, I was already humming Madonna’s ‘Beautiful Stranger’ when you mentioned this title last week…)

Allison Albright

I'm just so happy you guys are doing a bunch of Shirley Jackson.

Jim Cannon

I thought you guys only covered fiction. This was a true story. Let's say it hit a little close to home and leave it at that.

Jeff

“The Beautiful Stranger” is one of Shirley Jackson’s best short stories, and I loved your discussion of it. The story can be interpreted in a number of ways, but all of them are unsettling. I don’t think anyone in the history of American letters has so perfectly mastered that mere “touch” of the unsettling as the formidable Ms. Jackson!

Colm Kearns

The psychological lens Chad and Chris analysed this story through is probably nearer the mark, but I like to think of it as a sort of faerie pact. The main character wishes her husband away for a perfect substitute and the capricious otherworldly powers comply... but the catch is: she can be replaced just as easily too. Perhaps when she's lost in the faerieland labyrinthine reflection of her neighbourhood at the end, a 'perfect' replacement of her has just arrived at her real home.

Ethan Cordray

This is a perfect exploration of "The Uncanny," as defined by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay -- when something intimately familiar suddenly takes on an unfamiliarity. The final image, of standing in your own street and feeling it to be an alien street that you've never seen, is in fact one of the core examples that Freud uses. He describes it as the feeling of terror that comes when something you *think* you know very well reveals some aspect that throws all of your assumptions into doubt. But Jackson does something completely beyond Freud's perspective, depicting the possibility that such an uncanny break might be *positive.* The wife's fearful, anxious, unpleasant familiarity with her husband melts away, and her uncanny alienation becomes a thrilling state of new possibility and excitement. The transformation isn't terrifying; it's sublime. It's kind of a bummer that Jackson chose to end the story with that moment of anxiety. I'd like to think that her thrilling moment of uncanniness broke her out of the cycle of anxiety and conflict, and both Margaret and John learned to see one another in a different and better way. The promise of The Uncanny, after all, is that transformation is possible even in our most well-worn everyday lives. And that doesn't have to be ultimately horrific, even if it starts out as scary and weird. I think about people who break addictions, or who undergo life-changing religious conversions. Sometimes, the way out of personal darkness is sudden and kinda crazy.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Makes me think of the case of the "Return of Martin Guerre," a true story made into a Gérard Depardieu flick (and the American remake "Sommersby"), in which a missing 16th-century French soldier returned to his village and lived with his wife for a few years, but turned out to be an impostor (eventually the real Martin showed up). Historians argue whether the wife, Bertrande, was duped or whether she accepted the stranger because it was easier to get on in 1500s rural France with a husband and the man treated her well. There's also a Philip K. Dick story "Human Is," in which an alien impostor replaces a woman's abusive husband, and she knows but goes along with it. I first encountered it in the "Electric Dreams" anthology series from 2017, with Bryan Cranston and Essie Davis. (EDIT: The next episode after that is the much less happy alien-imposter story "The Father-Thing.") And I guess there's the Kevin Kline movie "Dave."

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

On a gloomier note, I can sadly relate to getting trapped in a relationship pattern where every argument quickly becomes every past argument, too. Ultimately, the only way to stop it was for us to split up. (Years later, we're both happier now—with different partners.)

GG2025

I agree that this story and your discussion are top notch! One interpretation I keep coming back to is that the wife is slowly losing her memory. Early on she literally doesn’t remember if her husband is coming or going. At the end she can’t remember her own address. There are lots of conditions that could cause this, from mini-strokes to early onset dementia. Maybe this is too literal, though. I prefer your interpretation that Jackson is commenting on the shallowness of suburbia and how we must filter out many powerful emotions and impressions to maintain the charade of orderly lives, shrunken though they may be. Hey there’s some cosmic horror for ya!

The Evil Cub

Came here to say something similar

Beanz

I would have thought this was about when parents have to rediscover their relationship's spark, but the references to hands and fear immediately led my mind to an abusive relationship and the "honeymoon period" after an abuser is taken back in. Not knowing if this time is him coming or going at the station emphasizes that she's been through this cycle so many times, she can't keep track. I think that this Not-John is the version of him that she fell in love with and whenever he returns, they start over. But when he leaves in 2 weeks, I bet she stays home after another fight. She forgets what her home looks like after taking action toward making it represent them both. She isn't able to follow through with it. It's almost like she isn't allowed to. It broke my heart at first and reminded me of the other story, "The Bus." I've had that disconnect from reality too and, god, it was awful. In a fairy tale, her inability to find that house again would be a blessing to break the cycle. She'd finally be free. But in this story, if she truly can't find her home, the police will call her husband to pick her up from the station and we don't know how he'd take that. Which John would show up? And is the little girl ever named? I can't help but notice that if the son is also named John, she literally only acknowledges 1 name throughout the story. Fun that his name is John. He could be anyone. Any John Doe.

It's a Ghost.

I definitely took this story to be about being a stay-at-home mother in suburbia, not seeing other people, and losing your mind taking care of the kids all day every day. All the while your husband is very often away, living aside and interacting with other people and visiting different and interesting places. Also, I think she’s losing her mind because she seemed confused from the outset, not knowing whether John was coming or going, while the son doesn’t seem to think his dad is a stranger. And in the end she’s “lost out here.” She’s lost in suburbia while her husband gets to live in the world and travel and then come home now and again and have fun times with the kids without having to deal with the day-to-day of parenting.

Steven Moore

I’m not sure why but I get a vibe from the movie vivarium, especially the last mention of the rows and rows of houses.

KateSherrod

This reminded me that I still need to read SJ's non-fiction about her own experiences as a full-time, stay-at-home mom of four children, with an occasionally philandering husband. There are two of these, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons (quite the way to describe the kids, no?). So I suspect this story was more than a little autobiographical, and more than a little wish fulfillment, but oops, all Shirley Jackson!