The Lottery.
Written by Shirley Jackson and Adapted and Illustrated by Miles Hyman
Written by Shirley Jackson and Adapted and Illustrated by Miles Hyman
About Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was born on December 14, 1916, in San Francisco, California, and grew up nearby in Burlingame. She first attended the University of Rochester and then Syracuse University, where she became fiction editor of the campus humor magazine.
After graduating in 1940, Jackson moved to New York City. She began to write professionally, her short stories appearing in such publications as The New Yorker, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Ladies' Home Journal.
She also wrote novels like The Road Through the Wall, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle as well as the witty, embellished memoir Life Among the Savages, which tells of her domestic experiences. Often relying on supernatural themes, she was known for tackling provocative, chilling subject matter that was culturally incisive and held metaphors for how people dealt with differences. She was married to critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she had four children.
Shirley Jackson died on August 8, 1965, from heart failure. Decades later, two of her children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt, had edited a collection of her unpublished works, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. The compilation, released in August 2015, marked the 50th anniversary of the author's death.
To this day, Shirley Jackson is best known for her short story The Lottery.
Summary of The Lottery
In a small anonymous town live approximately three hundred people. On a clear morning, June 27th, the townspeople, starting with the children, assemble for the annual lottery which will begin at ten in the morning and end at twelve in the afternoon. While the girls chat to one side, the boys, including Bobby Martin, Harry Jones, and Dickie Delacroix, pocket stones. Shortly thereafter, the men and women begin to gather, chatting amongst themselves before standing together as families.
The lottery is conducted by Mr. Summers, a childless man married to an unpleasant woman. He is assisted by Mr. Graves, who follows him to bring the three-legged stool upon which Mr. Summers places a very worn black box. The black box used for the lottery is even older than the oldest town citizen, Old Man Warner. Mr. Summers stirs the slips of paper inside the black box. Originally, wood chips were used, but as the town's population increased, Mr. Summers was forced to switch to paper to fit all the slips inside the box.
Before commencing the lottery, several lists had to be made: heads of households, heads of families, and members of each family. Mr. Summers efficiently tends to all the details and prepares to start the lottery. Tess Hutchinson is nearly late, but she arrives just in time to join her husband, Bill, and their children in the crowd. Mr. Summers makes sure that everyone who needs to be at the lottery is present and accounts for those absent. Then, the lottery begins.
Mr. Summers begins to call the names of each family alphabetically, and each head of the household, usually the patriarch, comes forward to take a slip of paper from the black box. As this happens, Mr. Adams mentions to Old Man Warner that a nearby village is considering giving up the lottery. Old Man Warner derides this suggestion, calling those people a "pack of young fools."
Once all the heads of households receive slips, they simultaneously check them. Bill has selected the special slip with the black dot, and his family is singled out. Tess is dissatisfied and accuses Mr. Summers of not giving her husband enough time to select his slip. Nonetheless, Mr. Summers rearranges the box so that it holds only five slips for the Hutchinson family. The family comes forth, and each of them, Bill, Tess, and their children, select one of the five slips in the box.
One by one, the children, then Bill, reveal that their slips of paper are blank. The town realizes that Tess holds the remaining piece of paper with the black dot. The villagers start to collect stones, Mrs. Delacroix selecting one that is so large she can hardly carry it. As Tess protests, everyone, including her own family, descend upon her and stone her to death.
Themes
Suburban Horror
The short story demonstrates Jackson's penchant for this trope. As exemplified most clearly in Tess's stoning, Jackson's vision of horror is not limited to haunted houses or exotic locations. On the contrary, horror is engendered in the mind, in the banal brutality of everyday individuals, who may be mothers, fathers, wives, and husbands. Unhappiness, sheer dissatisfaction with one's life, can lead to the blurring of reality and fantasy, and even madness. And in this madness, horror can come alive in the most mundane of settings and situations (Le & Kissel, 2009) and enhance the contemporary reader's uneasy sense that the group violence in the story could be taking place anywhere and everywhere, right now. It is also what prevents any of the villagers from questioning their roles in ritualistic murder (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Society and Class
Basically, the story asks readers to think about the rituals and traditions they unthinkingly follow as members of their societies. Beyond critiquing the ways in which custom obscures right and wrong, the lottery also becomes a way of analyzing "traditional" social and gender divisions: the anonymity of the village lends the short story a sense of universality and the villagers live in an intensely patriarchal society.
The random distribution of paper means some families are fortunate and others are not. They think it is significant that it is paper that has come to replace wood chips - much as paper money has taken the place of gold or goods for barter. The paper, either in the lottery or in the wallet, symbolizes exchange value; as people get more "civilized," they lose track of what the paper really means. In the case of both the lottery and cash, paper can mean either good or bad fortune - and it is disturbing how much life and wealth can be left up to the gambles of chance (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Exclusion
The text is not about short-lived mass hysteria like the Salem Witch Trials. Rather, it is a regular thing; like a witch trial that happens every year, where one unfortunate person gets excluded. Their exclusion gives the remaining community members a bonding experience (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Tradition and Customs
The story is about an annual tradition practiced by the villagers of an anonymous small town, a tradition that appears to be as vital to the villagers as New Year celebrations might be to others. Yet, subtle hints throughout the story, as well as its shocking conclusion, indicate that over time, the lottery has become a meaningless tradition for the villagers to follow. What is particularly important about tradition in the text is that it appears to be eternal: no one knows when it started, and no one can guess when it will end. Its apparent lack of history is what makes tradition so powerful: it is like a force of nature, and the villagers cannot even imagine rebelling against it as it a part of their traditional life and as such, still holds meaning for them.
It is sometimes true that people do not think about the origins or significance of many of their regular traditions. During Halloween, most children put on costumes and go trick-or-treating without knowing that the early precursor to the holiday is Samhain, an ancient Celtic ritual of bonfires and animal sacrifices, when the worlds of the living and the dead were thought to intermingle.
Whether its origins are good or bad, a given tradition can seem like it has always been present. It often does not appear to have a history or logic of its own; it just is, and this type of thinking makes tradition hard to question. The piece can be, therefore, interpreted as a kind of plea: if one's only reason for doing something is that they have always done it, Jackson suggests that might not be a reason at all (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Hypocrisy
The Lottery explores sudden shifts in opinion and loyalties - in other words, hypocrisy. But it is worth asking whether changes in allegiance during the lottery are conscious enough to be construed as hypocrisy: the ritual of the lottery appears to be so naturalized that the villagers cannot think rationally or critically about what they are doing. It is only the outsiders who can really confront the madness of this ritual. In fact, it is the villagers' earnestness that is so particularly frightening. They are too blinded by tradition to see that violence against their neighbors is a betrayal of their emotional bonds, whereas the purpose of the lottery is now less important than its rote maintenance (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Family
The story plays around with the concept of family in interesting ways. The thing is, each person in the lottery must draw by household, so this is the moment, each year, when belonging to a given family has the most socially recognized significance. During this collective ritual, though, it is during the lottery that the emotional bonds that connect mother to child, husband to wife, and friend to friend, become completely insignificant. Once the lottery has ended, family bonds reassert their importance, and the families who have lost members mourn them. So, Jackson is clearly drawing a line between the "social place" of families (with their patriarchs and unfair distribution of luck) and the emotional importance of family ties, which is a private matter (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Symbols
The Lottery⚫
The lottery is a plethora of symbols in the story. Communities across the United States practice different annual traditions - Easter egg hunts (with origins in early fertility rituals), Christmas tree decorating (evolved from the Germanic tribes' patron trees), or July 4th fireworks (to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence). The point is that Americans are all comfortable with yearly rituals - and it is often not widely known how these celebrations began since tradition obscures the history of public ritual.
People associate lotteries with good things, especially with the odds of winning cash prizes, and annual celebrations also seem pleasant. Like the blooming, cheerful village in the short story, there is nothing in the lottery that immediately suggests anything is wrong with this set-up. The lottery is, in fact, operating as an allegory of village life itself: at first, it seems harmless, but then readers start to wonder what is going on with all the subdued smiles and piles of stones.
If the lottery is an allegory of the community, its rules and proceedings must in some way correspond to real-life elements of village society; if Jackson was willing meticulously to give so many of the characters heavily symbolic names, readers must assume that she is equally careful in developing the lottery as an allegory.
One thing that is striking is the lottery's initial breakdown of the villagers into households. Each head of the family draws for the household, and the whole group must abide by what the head draws. But isn't it true that people are all usually broken down by household? The household, whether it be one of parents and children, couples, or friends, is the first unit of social interaction. What is more, members often do have to abide by the conditions of their households as a whole - the metaphorical strips of paper that their parents draw.
Some people get lucky in the draw, and some do not. As soon as the villagers show up in that town square, as soon as they consent to participate in society at large, they leave themselves open to the chance of catastrophic failure. Even rich Joe Summers and powerful Harry Graves must draw from the box: they are all subject to the vagaries of luck that the lottery represents. And all of them, eventually, are going to die. So, the lottery symbolizes not only life's chances, but also the sudden, unexpected nature of death.
As for the household, it seems kind of weird that it was always the man of the house doing the drawing. The norm in the village is that each man is literally choosing not only his fate, but also the fate of his entire family. Women have no agency in this situation, which reflects the overall patriarchal nature of the traditional values of this village society.
Still, it should be noted while it is only men who get to choose, their wives are willing participants in the event. So even though tradition is keeping them in places of diminished power, they seem to support their inferior status as traditional.
The origins of the lottery are murky; even Old Man Warner does not know when it began. His association of the lottery with the abundance of corn suggests that it began as overt human sacrifice, in which one person's murder somehow equaled plentiful corn harvests. Now, though, "the original paraphernalia for the lottery [has] been lost long ago" (5) and there is widespread forgetfulness on the old preparations for the lottery since there used to be a song, a speech, a ritual salute. But how can one stop something when they do not know how it started? Without a sense of the lottery's history, it has become a totally hollow act, one to be completed in time "for noon dinner" (1).
The loss of the lottery's origins poses a profound ethical question: obviously, it would be bad if the lottery began as human sacrifice, but at least then there would be a logic to it. In the story, readers see Mr. Graves helping Davy Hutchinson select a strip of paper from the black box, they see the boys collecting their stones: they are being trained to see the lottery as naturally as their parents do. They are, in fact, being instructed in savagery. The lottery has become completely self-perpetuating; it no longer needs an explanation.
Perhaps the boys take to the lottery with such enthusiasm because it is mankind's essential nature to be brutal, but it is providing institutional recognition for murder that might not otherwise be allowed. These children are being taught by their society to kill. Again, one cannot ignore the proximity of the story's publication to World War II. Readers do not want to press this point too hard, but they do think that it is legitimate to wonder whether the experience of mass violence on that scale might not be driving Jackson's commentary on the ways that society breeds violence into every new generation of young people (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
The Black Box⬛
The black box is a physical manifestation of the villagers' connection to tradition; Jackson is explicit on this point, when the subject of replacing the box comes up. The villagers believe that this box may, in part, be made up of shards of the previous boxes, back to the original Black Box. Readers must admit, that this reminds them of the practice of collecting Christian relics, like hair or bone from the bodies of the saints or pieces of the Cross. Jackson likes to upend Christian iconography in the story. This seems like it may be another example: the villagers use this relic of an earlier time to perpetuate their violent, unmerciful traditions.
Like the lottery, the black box has no functionality except during these two hours every June. The purpose of the box, like the lottery itself, has become obscure with the passage of time. It is well worn, but the villagers are reluctant to let it go, again, like the lottery itself. In fact, readers do not think it is too far-fetched to say that the villagers' treatment of the box represents their thinking about the lottery: they are a bit terrified by both the box and the lottery, but they are also too frightened and, perhaps, fascinated, to drop either one (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
The Three-Legged Stool3️⃣
Critic Helen Nebeker argues that the three legs of the stool allude to the three aspects of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit); the use of the stool to support the black box thus represents the manipulation of religion to support collective violence. It is true that this story is so short that everything in it seems like it must be symbolic of something. Another possibility is that this does not have to be the Christian Trinity at all; there are trinities in various religious traditions, like the three Norse Fates, or the Three Graces in Greek myths. The use of this three-legged stool may serve to underline more generally the ritualistic significance of the lottery as a holdover from generic Ye Olden Days (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
The Stones🪨
Stoning is not only a horrifying way to die, it is also, always, a crowd-generated death. In other words, stones allow all the villagers to participate freely in the ritual, from the youngest children to Old Man Warner. Stones are also significant as murder weapons because the first human tools were made of stone; this lottery really does seem to originate from the earliest type of violent human ritual. Also, stoning comes up specifically in the religious texts of all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. So, stoning is not just an early form of murder; it has a strong religious association with community punishment of abomination; in other words, stoning is the classic means for expelling an outsider to reinforce group beliefs (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Peer Pressure☠️
If a group of friends do something stupid, one has heard the refrain, "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?" One might probably answer "no," but Jackson disagrees. She thinks that everyone would race off that bridge if the community decided it was necessary. According to her, while individuals may be great, a group of people is another animal. An animal that cannibalizes on its own species.
The symbolic cannibalism shown in the end is what makes The Lottery of the most horrifying literary works people will encounter.
Like so many great horror stories, this one has a load of social commentary. It is like the world's creepiest public service announcement against peer pressure. Like those warnings about drinking or smoking - except Jackson is warning against joining a group without thinking about it (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008).
Background of The Lottery
Background of The Lottery
Shirley Jackson's well-known short story The Lottery was first published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker. The author's implicit critique of the brutality underlying the rituals and values of America's small towns outraged many magazine readers and generated the most mail in the history of The New Yorker, with many readers expressing confusion about underlying meanings and anger over its disturbing ending and cancelling their subscriptions. Despite the backlash, The Lottery became one of the most significant short stories of its era.
It was eventually translated into dozens of languages, and adapted for radio, screen, stage, and into a graphic novel illustrated by the author's grandson Miles Hyman.
Regardless of how one reacts to or interprets The Lottery, it has nevertheless established Shirley Jackson's position as one of the greatest American horror writers.
References
References
- Biography.com Editors. (2016, November 17). Shirley Jackson. Biography. https://www.biography.com/people/shirley-jackson-9351425
- Hyman, M. (2016). Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": The Authorized Graphic Adaptation. Hill & Wang.
- Jackson, S. (2015). Lottery, The. In Lottery and Other Stories, The (pp. 291-302). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1948).
- Le, D. D. & Kissel, A (Ed.) (2009, July 31). The Lottery and Other Stories "The Lottery" Summary and Analysis. GradeSaver. https://www.gradesaver.com/the-lottery-and-other-stories/study-guide/summary-the-lottery
- Le, D. D. & Kissel, A (Ed.). (2009, July 31). The Lottery and Other Stories Summary and Analysis of "The Lottery". GradeSaver. https://www.gradesaver.com/the-lottery-and-other-stories/study-guide/summary-the-lottery
- Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). The Lottery. Shmoop. https://www.shmoop.com/lottery-shirley-jackson/
- Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). The Lottery Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory. Shmoop. https://www.shmoop.com/lottery-shirley-jackson/symbolism-imagery.html
- Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). The Lottery Themes. Shmoop. https://www.shmoop.com/lottery-shirley-jackson/themes.html
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