The Lottery

I received an email from The New Yorker with a link to an archive, "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. I don't know why they did this at this particular time, as it's not a significant anniversary (the story was published in 1948), nor is it the time of year it was published (June 26th). But I read the story, which I have read a few times before, and thought to comment on it.

"The Lottery" is one of the most famous American short stories ever written. It prompted one of the most furious responses of any story ever published in The New Yorker, generating the most mail of any story, much of it hate mail. I suppose it hit a nerve, as it is a deceptively simple exposure of the conformity of small town America, to its deadly conclusion.

"The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there only about three hundred people, the who lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner."

So the story begins. I like to imagine how a first-time reader would process his paragraph. It certainly sounds nice, but what is this lottery? Further on, Jackson talks about boys gathering stones, what's that all about?

Jackson makes reference to the age of the ritual, and how some practises have fallen out of favor, but the core is that a man with a weathered black box sits before the gathered crowd and puts pieces of paper into that box. There is a drawing, with each household representative taking a piece of paper. Mr. Hutchinson draws the piece of paper with a black mark on it, the other papers are left to the wind. Mr. Hutchinson states that there are five members of his household, even as his wife, Tessie, protests that he was cheated. He and Tessie and their three children each redraw, and Tessie gets the damning paper.

"Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head."

Wow. That last sentence must have had a similar effect on readers, hitting them on the head like a stone. For now we fully understand--this is about ritual sacrifice.

Throughout the story we get dribs and drabs of what the lottery is and why it exists. People say that some towns have gotten rid of the lottery, but Old Man Warner calls them fools. He cites a maxim, "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." So the lottery is about agriculture, something that stretches back eons, the notion that a sacrifice to the gods of a person will guarantee a good crop.

But this story is unnerving because it is not about the Aztecs sacrificing a virgin, it's about a small American town. There is a disturbing acquiescence--the only protests come from Tessie, who knows she is about to die. People of all ages are included in the lottery--we can be thankful, I guess, that Jackson didn't have a child win the lottery, but I suppose that story would have been too much. She does have Tessie's own children gather up pebbles--they will be part of the stoning.

I was interested to read about the choice of names in the story. Delacroix ("of the cross"), Summers, Graves, Adams (a biblical reference) and then Hutchinson, which refers to Anne Hutchinson, a religious reformer of the Puritan colony who formed a schism and was tried and banished. There is no room for dissent in Jackson's story.

"The Lottery" has become part of the consciousness of Western literature. The idea of a lottery has appeared in many other works, including The Hunger Games. In Richard Adams' Watership Down, there is a chapter called "The Silver Wire," where the rabbits encounter a colony who have a good place to feed, but every so often one of them gets trapped by a wire, and they accept this trade off. Would we accept a trade off like that?