The truth behind Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

As a native Greek, I had never had the chance to study this story in the past, so in this essay, I am expressing some views on the context of the story. Hope you enjoy!

The Truth Behind Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

Being one of the most well known pieces of short fiction in American literature, The Lottery is without a doubt a story that encapsulates dense meanings, and in my opinion, sheds light on an element inherent in human nature, on which I will elaborate in this essay. The setting is a small village of about three hundred residents, where a ritual takes place annually. In this ritual, there is a black box and whoever draws a marked paper from inside the box, has to be stoned to death.

 Before delving into the themes of the specific story, it is crucial that we mention the purpose of the ritual, which is seemingly good harvest.  In a more scientific approach, killing a human cannot in any way reassure how the harvest of an area may be, however, it seems like the procedure of cultivating the land and anticipating plants or crops to grow from inside it using water or the sun has been linked in the collective conscience of peasants with the cycle of human life. Thus, seeds that are reaped have the opportunity to grow and bring new life, like the act of resurrection of humans, which is the most promising ray of hope after the death of mortals. After all, good harvest means life in actual terms, because in rural areas during previous centuries the sole source of food was the crops the land made, or did not make.

It is evident that such a vital procedure can cause anxiety to a whole village, or to put it more accurately, there is a widespread fear of the unknown, because the villagers’ lives depend on it. In a similar vein, in contemporary societies, although there is not such fear for starvation due to some bad crop, there is always and will always be a fear for losing our lives one day, a fate that is inescapable. The power of such fear is great and all the people share it. Especially low-educated societies, can then be easily tricked into finding ways to release the energy of that fear, whether it may be through religion or other rituals they might do, individually or as a society.

Coming back to the story, there are numerous characters that have symbolic names, alluding to religion and superstition, such as Mr Summers, as the midsummer season is that of the best harvest, Mr Graves, who is associated with death, the exact opposite. Some names, like Delacroix, which reminds us of Eugene Delacroix, the famous Rennaissance painter or Benthan, who was a rival of capital punishment during the Enlightenment years, may seem quite ironic taking into account the ending of the story. The villagers of this story engage in ostensibly innocent activities that have a fatal outcome, known to them, yet they do not mind at all. According to Carl Yung, this tradition all of the villagers participate in, helps the individual find  a place and a meaning in the life of the generations, something that Yung calls an archetype. For this purpose, they use a scapegoat which dies in the end and everyone participates in the killing, thus making it a ritual and something morally acceptable, while if a sole individual killed a woman using stoned, it would be considered murder. Consequently, there is a mob mentality that leads to criminal acts justified in the collective conscience, and at the same time it is a way to release the collective feeling of anxiety towards loss of prosperity and death.

However mysterious and a little eerie the story may be, American readers first read it in 1948, a post World War II era with dramatic decimation of populations and great disasters. The readers disapproved of such a story, or just did not know what it meant. Be that as it may, Shirley has tried to make it really obvious that the story is about the meaninglessness of violence humans use even after centuries of evolution and after the creation of civilized societies. Maybe the names of Delacroix or Bentham were a hint to the educated man who nonetheless can be drawn into actions with no meaning, causing detrimental aftermath, especially several years after the most destructive war in history, when its most dark pages were written. Even the name of the protagonist, Hutchinson, was taken from heroic figure in history, a woman who was the leader of the Antinomian Controversy and fought against the androcentric leadership in Boston. The gender of the victim in Shirley’s story may also not be arbitrary, but can give another dimension to the victimization of women in society, in addition to the rest of the meaningless sufferings of the human race.

Finally, it is worth mentioning how this motif of sacrifice for prosperity is recurrent in other literary works, like The Ritual by David Pinner, in which a policeman goes to investigate the seeming disappearance of a girl in a remote small village, and comes to realize she is the the bait for his own sacrifice. Analogies can be made in the mentality behind the story with cults, where blind loyalty to a cause or a doctrine  can take the lives of hundreds of people, like the mass suicide of the members of Heaven’s Gate in 1997. A combination of both has been turned into a movie, Midsommar , in which a couple goes to see a traditional ritual in Sweden, but turns out into a nightmarish experience among members of a deadly cult. The movie was aired in 2019 and is based on an actual Swedish community festival, fortunately not including life threatening processes.

Author's Note

I am Greek so pardon my mistakes, constructive criticism is welcome of course :)