The lottery by shirley jackson annotations

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The Lottery Shirley Jackson Born: December 14, 1916; San Francisco, California Died: August 8, 1965; North Bennington, Vermont Quick Reference

First published: 1948 Type of work: Short fiction Type of plot: Horror Time of plot: June 27, late 1940’s Locale: Probably New England Principal characters Tessie Hutchinson, a housewife Bill Hutchinson, her husband, a farmer Bill, Jr., , Nancy, and Dave, the young children of Tessie and Bill Mr. Summers, a businessperson Mr. Graves, the village postmaster Old Man Warner, an elderly villager Dickie Delacroix, a village child Mrs. Delacroix, Dickie’s mother The Story: Just before 10 a.m. on June 27, the three hundred inhabitants of a small village in New England start gathering at the town square. The children arrive first, and some of the boys begin to put rocks and stones into a pile. As the morning progresses, the men of the village begin to arrive, coming from their farms and fields. They are soon joined by their wives, who have come from their household chores. The scene is convivial: The children laugh and play, and the adults joke and gossip. Eventually, Mr. Summers, a local businessperson who seems to be in charge of the assembly, arrives, carrying a large black box. He is followed by the village postmaster, Mr. Graves, who carries a stool. Two men help Mr. Summers place the heavy box on the stool, and Mr. Summers begins to stir and shuffle the hundreds of slips of paper that are inside the box. Then, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves begin drawing up lists of

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families, including the head of each household and the names of all members of each family. The old and decrepit box makes it clear that some sort of ancient tradition is being followed. The villagers recall that in the past the procedure had been longer and more elaborate. The oldest denizen of the town, Old Man Warner, points out that this is his seventy-seventh year participating in the ritual, called simply the lottery. As the men are working on the lists of families, Tessie Hutchinson arrives, the last villager to join the crowd at the square. Tessie had realized at the last minute, while she was washing dishes, that today is June 27. Her friends and neighbors tease her about her tardiness. The lottery begins. Mr. Summers calls up each head of household in alphabetical order, from Adams to Zanini. As people draw their slips, the villagers show a certain degree of nervousness. However, homespun humor reasserts itself when Bill Hutchinson is called and his wife urges him forward in a raucous and bossy way, causing those around her to snicker. While the drawings by the heads of households continues, Old Man Warner gets into a discussion with the people sitting near him about the background of the lottery. It appears that the lotteries used to be common in the region, but some villages have given up the practice. These breaks in tradition elicit Old Man Warner’s scorn: “There’s always been a lottery,” he insists, and he attributes the abandonment of the ritual to the current generation, whom he denounces as a “[p]ack of young fools.” He also reveals that the lottery is in essence a fertility ritual, and he quotes a half-forgotten adage: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” All of the heads of families have finished drawing their slips of paper. Bill finds that he has drawn a slip with a dark splotch. It soon becomes apparent that something sinister is going on, as Tessie shouts out, “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair.” Dickie Delacroix’s mother urges Tessie to “Be a good sport,” and Bill’s advice to his wife is grim and terse: “Shut up, Tessie.” Tessie, however, continues to argue about the fairness of the procedure. The slips of paper are retrieved, including the one with the ominous black splotch. Next, each of the five members of the Hutchinson family is made to draw from five slips. As this second drawing proceeds, one of Nancy Hutchinson’s school friends murmurs, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” a wish that draws fresh scorn from Old Man Warner. The Hutchinsons each display their slips of paper — Tessie’s slip is dotted. Mr. Summers announces “Let’s finish quickly,” an exhortation in keeping with an earlier indication that the time of the lottery has been set at 10 a.m. so that the villagers can return home in time for their noon meals. As Tessie stands alone, her neighbors and family and friends pick up stones and rocks from the piles the boys had amassed earlier. Dickie’s mother selects a rock so huge, she can barely lift it, and little Dave Hutchinson, too, is given a few small rocks to throw. As Tessie shrieks about the unfairness of the ritual, the villagers begin to stone her to death. Critical Evaluation: The publication of “The Lottery” in The New Yorker in June of 1948 created a scandal. Many readers canceled their subscriptions to the venerable magazine, and others wrote threatening letters to its author, Shirley Jackson. Later generations were puzzled by this controversy. The sources for the furor and scandal can be found in the structure of the story and its themes, in the mood of Americans in the late 1940’s, in the prejudices held

by the reading public against certain literary genres, in the venue in which the story appeared, and in Jackson’s persona. “The Lottery” presents a prototypal example of the surprise ending. Many writers, including Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Saki, and H. H. Munro, made this sort of plot twist a hallmark of their craft. A decade later, two long-running television series, The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, regularly employed this device as well. Surprise endings often lead to reader delight, but not so with Jackson’s macabre story of human sacrifice. Jackson provides subtle hints in the story that something grim is in the offing — for example, the gathering of stones and rocks, the crowd’s sense of nervousness as the lottery proceeds, and Tessie’s alarm when her family “wins” the initial phase of the contest. Also, the lottery is held at the end of June, near the summer solstice, a time of year that features prominently in agricultural festivals throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Nevertheless, the characters seem so wholesome, so stereotypically small-town American, that it is easy for the reader to overlook the clues that Jackson provides. Such subtlety is a hallmark of Jackson’s craft, one to which horror novelist Stephen King made reference in the dedication to his 1980 novel Firestarter: “In memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice.” In this dedication, King lists four of Jackson’s most celebrated works, one of which is “The Lottery” and the other is Jackson’s best-known work of long fiction, The Haunting of Hill House. This novel, too, begins in June and ends with a similar, though symbolic, sacrifice. The surprise ending to “The Lottery” also reveals Jackson’s dark themes, including the warping effect on society of mindless tradition. Old Man Warner, the embodiment of rigid tradition, seems to believe that the sacrifice is necessary to ensure sufficient food for the village, but the other villagers are maintaining the practice out of habit and sheer inertia. They have forgotten why they are doing the ritual and have let it become a corrupt, atrophied shade of its earlier form; still, they insist on keeping the lottery because it has always been done. Simply out of tradition, they unquestioningly stone to death a neighbor whom they were laughing and joking with minutes earlier. An even more pessimistic theme of the story is its interrogation of altruism and humanitarianism. No one in the village shows any concern for justice and kindness except Tessie — and she, too, starts to complain about the lottery only when she realizes that it is going to directly affect her own family. In short, Jackson suggests that people are not concerned about injustice and kindness unless these problems touch them personally. The story’s surprise ending and its unflattering depiction of human nature must have been especially unsettling to readers in the late 1940’s, when Americans were especially proud of the role they had played in defeating the Nazis in World War II. Having recently vanquished a cruel and inhumane enemy, perhaps Americans were not ready for a story that implied that they themselves could be cruel and inhumane. Jackson hints that these characteristics are woven into the fabric of the United States by giving her characters names that were prominent in the nation’s early years (for example, Adams and Hutchinson). The names Summers, Graves, and Delacroix — literally “of the cross” — reflect other themes and motifs implicit in the story, such as, respectively, agrarian tradition, death, and sacrifice.

Furthermore, a surprise ending involving human sacrifice placed “The Lottery” in the genre of horror fiction, a type of writing dismissed as unsophisticated and sensationalistic and, therefore, fodder for cheap pulp magazines. The New Yorker had been the most prestigious venue for short fiction in the mid-twentieth century, and its subscribers must have felt duped into reading what they thought was “trashy” writing. Adding to the reading public’s angry response to “The Lottery” was Jackson’s public persona. In 1948, she was known as a writer of humorous articles and short stories detailing her experiences as a housewife and mother of four children. Few if any readers would have expected from her a harrowing depiction of blind tradition and merciless selfishness, like that revealed in “The Lottery.” Essay by: Thomas Du Bose Further Reading

Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975. An excellent introduction to Jackson’s work. The chapter “Social Evil” is devoted primarily to explicating “The Lottery.” Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Part one is devoted to Jackson’s short stories, including “The Lottery.” Hall’s bibliography, although dated, is extremely thorough and includes critical responses to Jackson’s writings. Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. An excellent, detailed critical assessment of Jackson’s body of work, including “The Lottery.” Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Hyman, literary critic and theorist as well as Jackson’s husband, compiled this anthology the year after her death. His preface contains a pithy assessment of the theme of “The Lottery.” King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. 1981. Reprint. London: Hodder, 2006. A champion of the work of Jackson, novelist King discusses “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill House in this overview of horror fiction. Kosenko, Peter. “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ’The Lottery.’” New Orleans Review 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1985): 27-32. A compelling interpretation of “The Lottery” from Marxist and feminist perspectives. Murphy, Bernice M., ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Essays in this collection survey Jackson’s legacy as a writer of gothic fiction, focusing on her lesser-known works. Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988. The definitive biography of Jackson. Oppenheimer provides a wealth of detail about the writing of “The Lottery” and the intense controversy that arose when it was first published in the summer of 1948. Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30, no. 1 (Spring, 1984): 15-29. A concise article that summarizes gothic elements in all of Jackson’s work. Reinsch, Paul N., ed. A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer (1919-1965): Reviews, Criticism, Adaptations. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2001. A vast resource listing secondary materials on Jackson’s life and work. Includes

contemporary reviews as well as later critical works. Also includes annotations and an introduction by the editor.