"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

1.24.22

“The Lottery”

I have this thing where I forget stories. Maybe it’s all the drugs I did when I was younger (way, way too many drugs for a developed or developing brain), or maybe it’s that my brain can only hold so much. Sometimes it makes me feel less intelligent, not good enough to be a writer. I’m not great at referencing stories I haven’t read in a long time.

So, when I read The Lottery, a story I hadn’t read in a few years, I was unprepared for everything. For some reason I remembered The Hunger Games and my brain told me, this story is like The Hunger Games. So as I read I looked for The Hunger Games. I didn’t find them, except in the gathering of a community, the vouching for those who are absent. The dread.

This story is brilliant in the way it holds itself in like a tightly buttoned jacket concealing a homemade bomb. The jacket looks prim, unobtrusive, and yet the fabric gives way in certain places, subtly revealing the danger underneath. It's clear that some of the buttons are stressed, but only upon close inspection. From far away it looks like a regular person is wearing a regular jacket.

It begins:

“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 were only about three hundred people, the whole 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.”

There is so much established here in this first paragraph— the smallness of the town, and its connection to other towns that also do the lottery. The story turns away from defining the lottery. This is a choice. Maybe another writer would have tried to describe the lottery, or even hinted at what it was, but the choice to simply drop it and leave it creates a soft kind of tension. That tension is soft because of what surrounds the lottery in the paragraph. “Clear and sunny” with profusely blossoming flowers and richly (richly!) green grass.

In these vibrant descriptions Jackson created a sort of binary here— the content of the story is dark, though we won’t know it’s full darkness till the end. Beginning a story with this brightness— what did it do for you as a reader? I’m interested. For me, it actually confused me. Before reading, I listened to this story on the New Yorker app but found that it doesn’t translate well to audio. I had to sit down and read it, to absorb the fullness of what Jackson created.

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Jackson grew up wealthy in San Francisco. She was different than the other kids. She didn’t gel with them. Instead, she spent her time reading and writing. From SF she moved to Syracuse (my alma mater) and studied journalism, and soon after that she married a fan of her writing, Edgar Hyman. They moved to Bennington, VT, where Hyman worked as a professor, and Jackson had his children and raised them as a housewife and “faculty wife.” She loved being a mother but also found it boring, and disliked Bennington (which is the town “The Lottery” is modeled after). She also hated being a “faculty wife.” Always seen as second to her professor husband.

I wonder, would Jackson have been canceled?

When “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker in 1948 the magazine received letters from thousands of readers, many of them angry about the violence of the story, the ending. Yet Jackson kept writing, eventually publishing the book The Haunting of Hill House, arguably one of the best gothic horror book to be written.

One can’t help but notice that “The Lottery” leans hard into the rigid gender roles and ideas of Jackson’s time, the same roles and ideas that often enraged her. Hyman, her husband, insisted on sleeping with other women and often slept with his students, yet Jackson was stuck. Stuck with him, stuck in the role of mother and faculty wife. To be so brilliant and yet so constricted, knowing that no matter how good your stories are you’ll always be second to your shitty husband; I can’t really imagine the rage I would feel on a daily basis.

That’s why the characters in “The Lottery” are one-dimensional. It’s intentional, an echo of the one-dimensionality Jackson experienced in her peers and community. The old black box is a stand-in for something much bigger:

“The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.”

There’s a progression here that mirrors old traditions. There’s a sense of clinging to something for the sake of clinging, a rigidity and refusal to grow or progress or change. But the truth is, and what’s demonstrated here so deftly, that no one really knows what the old box looked like or was. And this means no one truly knows what the old tradition was, or what its purpose was. Yet they cling to it, despite mutterings throughout the story that maybe, just maybe, they don’t need to do this anymore.

“Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations.”

So much of this story is grounded in tradition— yet the family that is chosen, the wife (of course) who is chosen for this lottery; she is the one who has protested the most. It’s no coincidence here that she is punished for having opinions and thoughts of her own. She is not like the rest. And she’s gravely punished for it.

“‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

The third person narration creates distance and objectivity in this story, yet it also enables the reader to see everything; the behavior of all the villagers. Third person works here because Jackson zooms in close to many of the characters, avoiding interiority but also catching small moments of stress, rejection, or the reinforcement of old traditions. The reader gets a sense that there are people in the town who no longer believe in the sacred lottery, but they’re outnumbered by those who do, and therefore they keep silent. This is cowardly, and its cowardice is exaggerated by the exaggerated world of the story. And yet the ones who enforce the lottery are cowardly, too.

What did you think about this story?

Our next story is a novella by Leo Tolstoy: The Death Of Ivan Ilych. I included this because it’s one of my favorite stories ever, and there’s so much that exists under its surface. You can find a PDF here.

Thank you so much for reading!