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THE LOTTERY by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's story portrays an "average"
New England village with "average" citizens engaged
in a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim
by means of a public lottery, and does so quite deviously:
not until well along in the story do we suspect that the "winner"
will be stoned to death by the rest of the villagers. One
can imagine the average reader of Jackson's story protesting:
But we engage in no such in human practices. Why are you accusing
us of this?
A survey of what little has been written about "The Lottery"
reveals two general critical attitudes: first, that it is
about man's ineradicable primitive aggressively, or what Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren call his "all-too-human
tendency to seize upon a scapegoat"; second, that it
describes man's victimization by, in Helen Nebeker's words,
"unexamined and unchanging traditions which he could
easily change if he only realized their implications."
OUTLINE
The most powerful man in a village, Mr.
Summers, owns the village's largest business (a coal concern)
and is also its major, since he has, Jackson writes, more
"time and energy [read money and leisure] to devote to
civic activities" than others (Jackson, 1982 ). (Summers'
very name suggests that he has become a man of leisure through
his wealth.) Next in line is Mr. Graves, the village's second
most powerful government official-its postmaster. (His name
may suggest the gravity of officials.) And beneath Mr. Graves
is Mr. Martin, who has the economically advantageous position
of being the grocer in a village of three hundred.
These three most powerful men who control
the town, economically as well as politically, also happen
to administer the lottery. Mr. Summers is its official, sworn
in yearly by Mr. Graves (Jackson, 1982). Mr. Graves helps
Mr. Summers make up the lottery slips (Jackson, 1982). And
Mr. Martin steadies the lottery box as the slips are stirred
(Jackson, 1982). In the off season, the lottery box is stored
either at their places of business or their residences.
When Bill Hutchinson forces his wife Tessie to open her lottery
slip to the crowd, Jackson writes, "It had a black spot
on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before
with [a] heavy pencil in [his] coal-company office" (Jackson
p. 301). At the very moment when the lottery's victim is revealed,
Jackson appends a subordinate clause in which we see the blackness
(evil) of Mr. Summers' (coal) business being transferred to
the black dot on the lottery slip. At one level at least,
evil in Jackson's text is linked to a disorder, promoted by
capitalism, in the material organization of modern society.
Although patriarchy is not a product of
capitalism per se, patriarchy in the village does have its
capitalist dimension. (New social formations adapt old traditions
to their own needs). Women in the village seem to be disenfranchised
because male heads of households, as men in the work force,
Provide the link between the broader economy of the village
and the economy of the household.
Within these norms, "heads of households"
are not simply the oldest males in their immediate families;
they are the oldest working males and get their power from
their insertion into a larger economy. Women, who have no
direct link to the economy as defined by capitalism-the arena
of activity in which labor is exchanged for wages and profits
are made-choose in the lottery only in the absence of a "grown,"
working male. Women, then, have a distinctly subordinate position
in the socio-economic hierarchy of the village.
The lottery's democratic illusion is an
ideological effect that prevents the villagers from criticizing
the class structure of their society. But this illusion alone
does not account for the full force of the lottery over the
village. The lottery also reinforces a village work ethic
which distracts the villagers' attention from the division
of labor that keeps women powerless in their homes and Mr.
Summers powerful in his coal company office.
The final major point of my reading has
to do with Jackson's selection of Tessie Hutchinson as the
lottery's victim/scapegoat. She could have chosen Mr. Dunbar,
of course, in order to show us the unconscious connection
that the villagers draw between the lottery and their work
ethic. But to do so would not have revealed that the lottery
actually reinforces a division of labor. Tessie, after all,
is a woman whose role as a housewife deprives her of her freedom
by forcing her to submit to a husband who gains his power
over her by virtue of his place in the work force. Tessie,
however, rebels against her role, and such rebellion is just
what the orderly functioning of her society cannot stand.
In stoning Tessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat
onto which they can project and through with they can "purge"-actually,
the term repress is better, since the impulse is conserved
rather than eliminated-their own temptations to rebel. The
only places we can see these rebellious impulses are in Tessie,
in Mr. and Mrs. Adams' suggestion, squelched by Warner, that
the lottery might be given up, and in the laughter of the
crowd. (The crowd's nervous laughter is ambivalent: it expresses
uncertainty about the validity of the taboos that Tessie breaks.)
But ultimately these rebellious impulses are channeled by
the lottery and its attendant ideology away from their proper
objects-capitalism and capitalist patriarchs-into anger at
the rebellious victims of capitalist social organization.
Like Tessie, the villagers cannot articulate their rebellion
because the massive force of ideology stands in the way.
As dismal as this picture seems, the one
thing we ought not do is make it into proof of the innate
depravity of man. The first line of the second paragraph-"The
children assembled first, of course" (Jackson, 1982)--does
not imply that children take a "natural" and primitive
joy in stoning people to death. The closer we look at their
behavior, the more we realize that they learned it from their
parents, whom they imitate in their play. In order to facilitate
her reader's grasp of this point, Jackson has included at
least one genuinely innocent child in the story-Davy Hutchinson.
When he has to choose his lottery ticket, the adults help
him while he looks at them "wonderingly" (Jackson,
1982). And when Tessie is finally to be Stoned, "someone"
has to "[give] Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles" (Jackson,
1982) to stone his mother. The village makes sure that Davy
learns what he is supposed to do before he understands why
he does it or the consequences. But this does not mean that
he could not learn otherwise.
How do we take such a pessimistic vision
of the possibility of social transformation? If anything can
be said against "The Lottery," it is probably that
it exaggerates the monolithic character of capitalist Ideological
hegemony. No doubt, capitalism has subtle ways of redirecting
the frustrations it engenders away from a critique of capitalism
itself. Perhaps it is not Jackson's intention to deny this,
but to shock her complacent reader with an exaggerated image
of the ideological modus operandi of capitalism: accusing
those whom it cannot or will not employ of being lazy, promoting
"the family" as the essential social unit in order
to discourage broader associations and identifications, offering
men power over their wives as a consolation for their powerlessness
in the labor market, and pitting workers against each other
and against the unemployed. It is our fault as readers if
our own complacent pessimism makes us read Jackson's story
pessimistically as a parable of man's innate depravity.
Works Cited
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p.291-301.
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