Jackson’s “The Lottery”

 Jackson lived from 1919 to 1965, mostly in small New England towns.

She was a highly disciplined writer.  Even though she was raising 4 children while her husband went to work, she would still run to her typewriter every time she got an idea. Instead of fighting writing, as other writers do, she embraced it.

Jackson was a graduate of Syracuse University in New York. During her student years she began to suffer from the anxiety and depression that followed her throughout her life.

Perhaps because of this, her writing is known for probing human psychology.  She hated intolerance and bigotry.  Common themes in her writing are evil cloaked in seeming good, prejudice and hypocrisy, loneliness and frustration, and psychological studies of minds that have lost their grasp of reality.

The victims in her writing are almost always women.  The typical Jackson protagonist* is a lonely young woman struggling toward maturity.  She is a social misfit, not beautiful enough, not charming enough, or articulate enough to get along well with other people.  The women in her writing do not fit the typical feminine stereotypes used by most writers of the mid 20^th century.  Most of her female protagonists, to put in bluntly, fail.

Males in “The Lottery” are symbols of authority and women are symbols of resistance to male authority.  The victim in “The Lottery” is named Hutchison; the same name Nathanial Hawthorne (another New England writer) gives the victim of the Salem witch trials in his novel, The Scarlet Letter.   The connection between the two New England women is their rebellious natures that are just beneath the surface.  These lonely, desperate women represent for Jackson the disintegration of modern life.

One critic said of her writing, “she satirizes a human condition where gullibility, cupidity*, and culpability reign virtually unrestrained by moral principle and create a community of the survival of the worst.”

Most scholars place Jackson’s style of writing within the horror genre; however, much of her writing also contains a sense of humor, thus creating a specialized type of horror known as “black comedy*.”  Another note on her style is that it is often “piecemeal.”  What this means is that the reader does not get all the information they might like to have and so must deduce or imagine the reasoning behind the story.  This is very true in “The Lottery.”

 The following statement is from Helen E. Nebeker’s article on the short story “The Lottery.” 

 Until enough men are touched strongly enough by the horror of their ritualistic, irrational actions to reject the long-perverted ritual, to destroy the box completely- to make, if necessary, a new one reflective of their conditions and needs of life-man will never free himself from his primitive nature and is ultimately doomed. Miss Jackson does not offer us much hope-they only talk of giving up the lottery in the north village. (107)

 *Protagonist-the principle player or character in a literary work

 *Cupidity-greed, lust, desire for wealth