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Rereading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a Tale of Jim Crow America

Terence N. Bowers
p. 241-258

Résumés

Les spécialistes ont généralement placé les œuvres de Jackson dans la tradition gothique de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Sa célèbre nouvelle “The Lottery” en est un parfait exemple : universellement considérée comme se déroulant en Nouvelle-Angleterre, elle est souvent interprétée à l’aune du sombre passé puritain de la région. Cette contribution propose un nouveau contexte : le Sud ségrégationniste. S’appuyant sur des éléments biographiques, textuels et historiques, elle montre que la violence rituelle décrite dans l’histoire est une manière d’aborder le problème de la violence dans le Sud et se rapproche avec une précision remarquable du rituel du lynchage, qui a sous-tendu la structure raciste de la société sudiste à l’époque de la ségrégation. Pour étayer cet argument, l’article démontre également que “The Lottery” est une histoire conçue pour être relue. La seconde lecture, déclenchée par le dénouement du récit et le choc qu’il initie, est une expérience totalement différente de la première en ce sens que les lecteurs sont amenés à découvrir une vérité soulignée par le sociologue Émile Durkheim : la violence humaine n’est pas causée, comme l’affirment certains critiques de “The Lottery”, par un mal inné ou un instinct brutal au cœur de l’être humain, elle est plutôt « le produit d’une culture morale bien définie ».

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  • 1 Scholarship on “The Lottery” has consistently situated it in New England, often drawing parallels b (...)

1The connection between Shirley Jackson and New England—the region where she lived during the most productive years of her life as a writer, from 1945 till her death in 1965—is often highlighted in the scholarship on Jackson. Bernice M. Murphy, for example, underlines “the indelible impression” that “New England’s landscape and inhabitants” left “upon Jackson’s writing” (125). It was in “New England’s unique environment,” Murphy explains, “and in her own sometimes difficult adjustment to that environment” that Jackson found “the perfect geographical corollary to her own fictional concerns” (125). Faye Ringel sees Jackson as a key figure of the New England Gothic literary tradition, which includes Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Melville, and Hawthorne. Citing The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) as well as “The Lottery” (1948) and other short stories, Ringel states that Jackson’s fiction and life “define the Gothic history and literature of New England” (“New England” 144), and that she “remains the greatest stylist of New England Gothic” (Gothic Literature 210). Jackson was especially drawn to the region’s dark past: she studied the history of witchcraft and magic (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 2), researched New England’s witch trials, and published The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956), a book for older children on the Salem trials. Murphy also observes that though the locations of most of Jackson’s novels and “many of her stories” are not stated, they all depict a “vague version of rural New England” (105). Her most famous work, “The Lottery,” is a case in point: the story’s actual setting is not mentioned, but it is universally seen as set in New England.1 Murphy calls it “Jackson’s most famously negative portrayal of New England village life” (124), and the entry for “The Lottery” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature confidently asserts that “Jackson set the story in the small Vermont town in which she resided” (Knox).

2While it is in many ways fruitful to analyze “The Lottery” in the context of New England and its literary tradition and history, it can also be limiting. As Murphy acknowledges, “the tale’s power lies in the fact that” one can “imagine it taking place in virtually any isolated rural community” (113). I would go further and say that it can also be imagined taking place in non-rural settings. “The Lottery” is, after all, a story about the nature and sources of human violence and is designed to make its readers ponder the causes of violence in their personal lives and in American life more broadly, not just in New England or in rural communities. As Jackson said in a 1948 interview, the goal of the story is to prompt its readers to reflect on “the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives” (qtd. in Franklin, Shirley Jackson 235).

3In this contribution, drawing on evidence from Jackson’s biography, evidence in “The Lottery” itself, and the short-story cycle in which it appeared—The Lottery; or, the Adventures of James Harris (1949)—as well as studies on racial violence in America, I will argue that the most relevant, though not the only, context in which to interpret the story at the time when Jackson wrote it is not New England, but the Jim Crow South (a context that has not been discussed in the scholarship on Jackson), and that the most direct real-world analogue to the type of community-sanctioned violence depicted in the story is the ritual of lynching (not the Salem witch trials). To help make this argument, I first argue that “The Lottery” is a narrative designed to be reread, and that the second reading of the story, which is precipitated by its shocking ending, is a wholly different experience from the first in that readers are prompted to recognize that much human violence springs not from an innate evil or primitive instinct within people, as some critics have argued, but from, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out long ago, the moral order that governs a society.

4Most studies of Jackson’s fiction focus on the extreme psychological states experienced by her characters and the eruption of demonic forces in their lives; this essay focuses on her depiction of the underlying social and cultural conditions that generate violence. If reading “The Lottery” shocks first-time readers, a deeper shock is felt in rereading it and discovering that the moral culture operating in certain communities (perhaps the reader’s), which is presumed to have the aim of bringing order and peace to the lives of their citizens, is actually the cause of much of the violence that takes place in them—the most horrific form of which in American life during Jackson’s lifetime was lynching.

Jackson’s Poetics of Rereading and Understanding Violence

  • 2 The only other critic to touch on the topic of rereading “The Lottery” is Helen E. Nebeker. In her (...)
  • 3 These reactions are typical of readers: in “Biography of a Story,” Jackson reports that the flood o (...)
  • 4 A recent New York Times article provides eloquent testimonies by readers to the haunting power of “ (...)

5“By nature, criticism requires rereading,” writes Sarah Chihaya (1478). All analyses of “The Lottery” involve some degree of rereading; however, little has been said specifically about “The Lottery” and rereading. A notable exception is Harold Bloom’s claim that though “The Lottery” “is crisply written and cunningly plotted. . . . it scarcely bears rereading, which is the test . . . for canonical literature” (9).2 Bloom’s assessment is mainly based on his view that the story’s characters lack complexity, and that despite its clever plotting and crisp writing, it is “something of a stunt,” absorbing once, but not twice because we have seen “the magic show” and know how it works (9). Implicit in Bloom’s distinction between canonical and non-canonical literature is the tenet that whatever pleasure, psychological insight, or wisdom a non-canonical work provides, it is all to be had in the first reading. One problem with Bloom’s assessment is that it contradicts the actual reading experience of many readers. For first-time readers, the most powerful feature of Jackson’s tale is its ending—the brutal and unexpected killing of the lottery winner—which, instead of closing the narrative, only generates urgent questions about what they just read: Did the villagers actually stone to death one of their neighbors? How could such barbarism occur in what seems to be a typical American farming community? What sane person would participate in such an act? What point could the author possibly be trying to make in telling such an outlandish tale?3 If there are certain texts, as Matei Calinescu remarks in Rereading (xi), “that haunt” us and have “mysterious claims over our memory, attention, and imagination,” “The Lottery” is surely one such text, for Jackson’s story, with its bewildering and horrifying ending, is crafted to make readers not only remember it, but also reread it in order to find answers to their questions.4

6In Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading, David Gelef categorizes “The Lottery” as a “twist-ending” story, whose compensation a reader receives in the second reading for loss of suspense enjoyed in the first is “an increase in anticipation” (19). This may be true for other “twist-ending stories,” but it does not adequately describe the experience of rereading “The Lottery,” in which the reader is seeking answers to pressing questions generated by the first reading and is surprised by how naïve and misguided he or she was in that reading. Rereading “The Lottery” is better described by what Elizabeth Ladenson terms “enforced rereading,” wherein certain passages of the narrative “can fully be understood only retrospectively, in the light of later passages” (251). In this regard, rereading “The Lottery” is a strikingly different experience from the first in that how we understand certain passages not only changes, but how we perceive the world of the story and our own world also transforms. The entire reading, rereading, experience thus takes the reader on a strange journey from innocence to shock and bewilderment to understanding and deeper shock.

7We can see Jackson’s poetics of rereading at work in the first paragraph of the story:

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. (“Lottery” 291)

  • 5 Seymour Lainoff noted in 1953 that the lottery is a modern version of a “primitive scapegoat rite,” (...)

8The opening sentence situates the lottery in a “village” on a beautiful “full-summer day” when “flowers” are “blossoming profusely” and “the grass” is “richly green.” Rereading the sentence produces an unsettling effect. Not only does the description of the idyllic setting provide a jarring contrast to the violence that concludes the story, but the reader now understands that in the eyes of the villagers, the landscape’s verdancy depends on the annual stoning of one of its citizens. The adage evoked by Old Man Warner—“‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon’” (297)—explains no lottery means no corn, no blooming “flowers,” no “richly green” fields.5 Thus when we reread the first paragraph, the “sunny” landscape of the opening scene darkens, and we start to see the world of the story very differently from our first reading.

9The opening paragraph also forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable, but crucial insight into human violence that will be developed throughout the story—namely, that much of it is officially sanctioned. From the start, Jackson emphasizes that the lottery is a public event. Of course, the reader is aware of this in first reading the story, but naively assumes that the winner will likely receive some sort of desired prize. Yet in the second reading, the reader knows that the lottery ends in a gruesome act of violence and is struck by how central that violence is to the civic life of the community. The lottery’s civic importance is stressed by the fact that it takes place in the village “square, between” two of the community’s core institutions, “the post office and the bank,” and occurs every year on “June 27th” not only in this village but also in other “towns,” some of which have “so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th” (291). The lottery is thus not unique to one crazed village, not something that happens in secret and perpetrated by a small, deranged sub-section of the local population, and not an aberration of community norms. Rather, it is a public event involving the whole population, anchored in the broader civic culture of the entire region, and conducted out in the open by leading citizens, men like the “postmaster, Mr. Graves” and the prominent businessman, Mr. Summers, who runs the local “coal business” and conducts other “civic activities,” such as “square dances” and “the teen-age club” (292).

  • 6 Durkheim explained his analysis of the social origins of certain kinds of violence in Professional (...)
  • 7 Peter Kosenko argues that the lottery promotes a strong work ethic by instilling an unconscious bel (...)
  • 8 Other critics who have expressed variations of this view are Lainoff, Brooks and Warren, Coulthard, (...)

10Jackson’s point in presenting the lottery as a public, widely-practiced civic ritual is to force readers to recognize that much human violence, far from being a deviation from social, civic, and moral norms, is rooted in them. In this respect, she imaginatively represents Durkheim’s insight that many violent acts are not “a survival of the tooth-and-claw instincts of animal nature,” but “the product of a well-defined moral culture” (124).6 Such is particularly the case in cultures that place the interests of the group over the needs and rights of the individual. In such moral systems, Durkheim explains, anything that threatens the group is the target of “severe penalties,” while attacks on the individual are “of small account” (119). When the group stands “as the supreme good . . . to which all else is subordinate,” people “come to attach such little value to individual life” that they “become used to the notion that it should and can be sacrificed to all sorts of things” (123-24). Societies centered on such a belief, Durkheim stresses, “carry the seeds of homicide” (123). And in societies where the sentiments attached to the group are especially strong—whether the group is “the State,” the community’s “religion,” or one’s “caste”—not only may those “sentiments lead to murder, but they produce . . . a kind of moral disposition inclining to homicide” (123). Jackson’s story dramatically illustrates Durkheim’s insight. The lottery is a ritual intended to maintain the collective well-being of the village, as Old Man Warner explains when he denounces as “‘crazy fools’” people in another village who are “‘talking of giving up the lottery’”: to do that, Warner says, would destroy the community’s work ethic (“‘nobody work any more’”),7 blight the land (no lottery, no corn), and lead to a collapse of civilization (people would “‘go back to living in caves’”) (“Lottery” 297). Warner makes emphatically clear that the killing done in the lottery is for the communal good; it is “the product,” in Durkheim’s phrase, “of a well-defined moral culture.” In this regard, we should not see the primary cause of the violence committed by the villagers as the eruption of humankind’s “atavistic nature lurking beneath . . . [the] civilized surface” of modern life, as Patrick J. Shields and others have argued (411);8 rather, we should see the violence as generated by the very moral system that creates the civilized surface.

11If it seems unthinkable that a sane person would willingly participate in the lottery, we are disabused of that assumption when we reread the second paragraph of the story:

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones. (“Lottery” 291)

  • 9 Kosenko notes that the “children have been socialized into the ideology of the lottery” (32).

12The first sentence, “The children assembled first, of course,” picks up on an important detail in the first paragraph—the fact that all citizens take part in the lottery—but makes clear that children are included too, even “very small children” (toddlers “who rolled in the dust” [291]), and even Davy, the little boy of the lottery victim, Tessie Hutchinson. The adverb “of course” at the end of the sentence is barely noticed or passed over by the reader in first reading the story because one assumes the lottery is a festive event that children naturally look forward to—so “of course,” they “assembled first.” But in the second reading, it is chilling because it emphasizes that the village children have been socially and psychologically conditioned into committing the act of murder from a very early age,9 and that this act is not only a normal part of their lives, but something they have learned to anticipate with excitement. As the text stresses, for the children the lottery is associated mainly with positive things—with the end of “School,” “books,” and “reprimands,” and the start of “summer” and “the feeling of liberty.” It is no wonder that after first gathering “quietly,” they “broke into boisterous play.” Significantly, in the next sentence, we are told that the boys start collecting stones. In the first reading, this act—perhaps for a game of marksmanship—seems innocent enough; but it is deeply disquieting in the second reading, for we see that, besides serving as a prolepsis of the murder, it shows that the boys are experienced lottery participants, know how it works, and are eagerly preparing for it by choosing the best stones. As the ending reminds us, they are the first ones ready when the stoning is about to begin: “The children had stones already” (301).

  • 10 See Kosenko, Oehlschlaeger, Whittier, and Hattenhauer (44-45).

13Not only are the children trained at an early age to see the lottery as a normal part of village life, but also, as various critics have noted, the lottery is intertwined with the formation of gender roles, with the boys’ development into men, and with the patriarchal structure of the community.10 Details pertaining to these aspects of the story acquire greater significance in the second reading once we come to understand the powerful socializing functions of the lottery. For instance, Bobby Martin, who first gathers stones and sets an “example” that “the other boys soon followed,” observes his father and older brother assisting Mr. Summers in conducting the lottery and later “watched his father go forward” as head of household to select the family lottery ticket (298). When Bobby reaches full adulthood, he will do the same. Already a leader of the boys, he is primed to become a leading citizen and take a prominent role in the lottery, just as he sees his father and brother doing now. Bobby and the other boys also learn that drawing a slip in the first round of the lottery will be a major moment in their lives, marking their transition from boyhood to manhood, a transition highlighted in this year’s lottery by the older “Watson boy.” When Mr. Summers asks, “‘Watson boy drawing this year?’” (295), it becomes evident that drawing the lottery ticket for his family constitutes the boy’s public ascension to full manhood and is “a male rite of passage” (Whittier 356), which the villagers validate as they shout, “‘Good fellow, Jack,’ and ‘Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it’” (296). Such is the lottery’s centrality to male identity and the socialization process of boys that to fully become a “man” requires that males draw a lottery slip for their households.

14While the lottery instills in boys the axiom that males are active and dominant, it teaches girls that females are to be passive and subordinate. Rereading the story, we realize that these dispositions have already been firmly internalized in the children, for while the boys emulate the men who run the lottery by actively preparing for the stoning—for example, the boys led by Bobby build “a great pile of stones in one corner of the square” and guard “it against the raids of the other boys”—the girls passively stand “aside . . . looking over their shoulders at the boys” (291). We also now realize that the norm that females must be submissive and compliant becomes the dramatic focus of this year’s lottery when Bill Hutchinson commands that his wife Tessie “‘[s]hut up’” (299), after she complains that the lottery drawing was unfair, and then “force[s]” the lottery slip “out of her hand,” when she will not show it (301). The lottery both inculcates the gender norms that males command and females obey, and enforces them.

15And in a broader sense, like other key rituals, the lottery does not just change the status of certain males (e.g., the “Watson Boy”) in the social hierarchy; more fundamentally, it creates the categories that make up the hierarchy. As the religious studies scholar Bruce Lincoln explains, “the statuses and categories that constitute the social order are themselves actively constructed within rites of passage” (114). Thus the lottery does not just elevate the “Watson boy” to the status of a man and head of household; it also reproduces man and head of household as the most important categories of personhood in the village’s social hierarchy. Likewise, each lottery reproduces woman and girl as categories of inferior status. We can therefore see that the lottery is more than a superstitious fertility rite that the villagers irrationally practice to insure a good harvest; it is a ritual intertwined with the construction of the community’s social order, functioning as an instrument by which the village (and other towns) legitimates and perpetuates its patriarchal hierarchy. To do away with the lottery would therefore alter the way gender roles are constructed and potentially destabilize the categories of personhood that constitute the social order of the village. To put this another way, the village’s patriarchal social structure in part depends on the lottery.

  • 11 Jackson felt this anti-Semitism from her parents, who opposed her marriage to Hyman (Franklin, Shir (...)
  • 12 On the story as a critique of McCarthyism, see Whittier (345) and Franklin (Shirley Jackson 235-36) (...)

16If rereading “The Lottery” changes how we see the story and the world it represents, as indicated at the outset, the larger goal of Jackson’s poetics of rereading is to make us re-see our world, to view it anew with fresh eyes, and to recognize forms of violence and oppression that our moral culture generates and sanctions. After all, if the most shocking aspects of “The Lottery” are the willingness of the villagers to participate in the lottery and their blindness to their own brutality, might we not, too, be morally oblivious or indifferent to forms of brutality that our culture sanctions because we have been conditioned to accept them? As commentators have argued, when Jackson composed “The Lottery” in 1948, she likely had the holocaust in mind (state-sponsored scapegoating on a vast scale) and the problem of anti-Semitism in America (Yarmove; Robinson)—a problem she was acutely aware of because her husband, Stanley Hyman was Jewish.11 Others have suggested that the story speaks to the rise of McCarthyism (another form of scapegoating) and antifeminism in America.12 Still, the story’s most direct connection to American life in Jackson’s time is the way it mirrors with uncanny accuracy the most widespread form of ritual murder in American history: lynching.

The Lottery and the Ritual of Lynching

  • 13 “Racism and anti-Semitism,” Hattenhauer says, “threatened her [Jackson] personally.” She feared tha (...)

17Surprisingly, critics have not explored the context of the Jim Crow South for understanding “The Lottery,” even though Jackson, as her biographer Ruth Franklin points out, fought against racism as a student at Syracuse University (1937-1940) and addressed the issue of racial prejudice in her work in “the years leading up to the civil rights movement” (Shirley Jackson 6). At Syracuse University, Jackson helped found the student literary journal Spectre, whose “primary political cause,” Franklin explains, was combatting “discrimination against blacks” (Shirley Jackson 123). Significantly, the second issue of Spectre contained “Black Woman’s Story,” a poem by Jackson that is “spoken in the voice of a woman whose husband is lynched” (Shirley Jackson 125). Jackson’s first New Yorker story, “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” satirizes “the racism typical of the American middle class—a theme that would recur regularly in her early fiction” (Shirley Jackson 174). “Alphonse” was also admired by Ralph Ellison, who was a close friend of Jackson and Hyman and a regular visitor to their home in the 1940s and 50s. The theme of how racial and religious prejudice operates as a toxic force in the lives of individuals and their communities is also developed in Jackson’s first novel, The Road through the Wall (1948), published the same year as “The Lottery.” Clearly, Jackson’s life and writings indicate that she was deeply concerned about racism in America.13 Recognizing this abiding concern suggests a new context in which to discuss “The Lottery,” shifting the long-standing critical focus from New England to the Jim Crow South.

18Of course, one might object that such a context is implausible given that there is no hint in the story that race plays any role in Jackson’s fictional village, but we should note that the issue of racism takes center stage in two of the stories in The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (1949)—the short-story collection in which “The Lottery” appeared a year after its publication in The New Yorker. The first story is “Alphonse” and the other is “Flower Garden,” one of the longest stories in the book, which is about a young widow named Mrs. MacLane, who moves into a cottage with her young son in a small town and is at first welcomed by her neighbors, but is later shunned by the community when she hires a black gardener, which causes her to leave the town. As Joan Wylie Hall has argued, The Lottery should be seen not as a collection of unrelated stories, but as a “short-story cycle” that forms a coherent whole, in which the stories are purposefully organized and interlinked in various ways (3-4, 11). One device that directly connects “Flower Garden” to the “The Lottery”—the culminating story of the cycle—is that Mrs. MacLane’s son is named “Davey,” the same name as Tessie’s son in “The Lottery.” This is no coincidence: as Hall convincingly demonstrates, Jackson strategically repeated certain names throughout The Lottery to indicate thematic links between stories (3-8). The use of the name “Davy” in “The Lottery” unmistakably recalls “Flower Garden,” inviting the reader to see patterns of interrelationship between the stories: both stories, for example, focus on individuals who are victimized by an oppressive belief system that governs the towns where they live; and both show how children are inculcated to uphold that system. Given the history of racial violence in the United States, it is easy to see how the racism permeating the town in “Flower Garden” can lead to the kind of shocking violence depicted in “The Lottery.”

  • 14 Here is one scenario that Brooks and Warren suggest as the type of cruelty that, in their view, the (...)
  • 15 Public executions were rare by the twentieth century (the last was in 1936), but lynchings were not
  • 16 The authors of Lynching in America “distinguish racial terror lynchings . . . from hangings and mob (...)
  • 17 In Lynching Beyond Dixie, Michael J. Pfeifer remarks that in the early 1900s, some observers saw ly (...)
  • 18 “Lynch law,” Sherrilyn Ifill explains, “was often regarded by whites as . . . a form of law that ha (...)

19In their classic analysis of “The Lottery,” Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren claimed that, though the story “deals . . . with live issues relevant to” mid-twentieth-century America,14 “[i]t is not literally about life in an American village” (75, 72). At first glance, this seems obvious—no stonings or grisly public executions happen in twentieth-century American towns—but we have only to recall the history of lynchings to dispel that blind belief.15 Between 1877 and 1950, there were over 4,000 documented “racial terror lynchings” in the South and several hundred more in other parts of the nation (Equal 4, 40-45).16 Like the ritual murder in “The Lottery,” lynching was a widespread practice, not an aberration from regional norms. Though the South was the epicenter of the practice, the fact that it occurred in other regions—primarily in certain states in the North and the Midwest during the Great Migration—indicates that lynching was an American problem, not just a Southern one.17 The practice was so pervasive that, according to Isabel Wilkerson, there was “a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century” (155). And like the killing done in “The Lottery,” lynchings were conducted in public, “sometimes in broad daylight” (Equal 4), and often on “the courthouse lawn” to show that, despite their extra-legal nature, they were seen as lawful acts and (to recall Durkheim) part of “a well-defined moral culture” of large swathes of America (Ifill 8).18 Furthermore, like the stoning of Tessie, lynchings were typically witnessed by large crowds amounting to “hundreds or thousands,” which “included elected officials and prominent citizens” (Equal 35)—the local equivalents of Mr. Graves and Mr. Summers. Lynchings were public, well attended events and approved by community leaders “implicated the entire community” in the killings (Equal 35), making them similar to the act of collective murder depicted in “The Lottery” where everyone participates, a point re-emphasized at the end of the story when Old Man Warner exhorts all the villagers, children included, to take part in the stoning: “Come on, come on, everyone” (“Lottery” 302).

20Although lynchings were ostensibly acts of justice that punished lawbreakers, as the authors of Lynching in America (2017) explain, it is more accurate to categorize them as “acts of terrorism” that took the lives of some “demonstrably innocent people” and others who had not been “legally convicted of any offense” (Equal 32). Indeed, “many victims” were not “accused of any crime” and “killed for minor social transgressions or for demanding basic rights” (5). The capricious way in which African Americans typically became lynching victims draws an eerie parallel to “The Lottery,” in which lottery victims are chosen at random.

  • 19 “Caste,” Wilkerson explains, signifies a ranking of human value “that sets the presumed supremacy o (...)
  • 20 In “Flower Garden,” when Mrs. MacLane unwittingly challenges the ideology of white supremacy—which, (...)

21Yet, the most significant similarity between the violent murder committed in “The Lottery” and those performed in lynchings centers on their socio-cultural function, which was to affirm the dominant group and the social order it embodied as “the supreme good” (to recall Durkheim’s phrase). In “The Lottery,” the group is the patriarchal order of the village: all must submit to and sacrifice for this “supreme good.” In the Jim Crow South, it was the white caste—to use Wilkerson’s preferred term—and the racial order it presided over.19 Historically, after the Civil War and the dismantlement of the institution of slavery, lynching helped “reestablish white supremacy” and then maintain it by instilling “an overwhelming sense of fear . . . in African Americans” (Equal 26, 68). In this way, it presented as spectacular displays of white power that made clear that anyone who challenged white dominance—“the supreme good”—would be met “with penalties that might indeed be terrible” (Durkheim 119).20

22Further, like the annual ritual killing conducted in “The Lottery,” lynching functioned as a potent socializing ritual. For one, it served as a way for whites to forge a bond of “group solidarity” that transcended their differences in class, political affiliation, and gender: “In lynchings,” Kristina DuRocher explains, “white Southerners offered up young African American males as scapegoats in a dramatic, ritualistic sacrifice that created fellowship among the white community” (114). Lynching also helped instill in generations of white children the values and behaviors of the Jim Crow South and thus played “a foundational role” in their “socialization” (Equal 70). For many non-Southerners, a shocking aspect of lynchings was that children often attended them. In this respect, the prominent presence of children in “The Lottery” mirrors the reality of lynchings: for just as the villagers in “The Lottery” believe children should take part in the stoning, in the South “the white community did not see having children witness racial killings as barbaric, but instead embraced the experience for their children as part of a protective duty”—a duty to protect them “not from violence or terror, but from a racial breakdown” (DuRocher 103, 7). The ritual of lynching thus staged vital “lessons” that taught children “how to dominate African Americans” in order to preserve “white domination” (DuRocher 103-04, 8).

  • 21 DuRocher cites an incident reported by anti-lynching campaigner Walter White, who ran into a group (...)

23Just like the lottery in Jackson’s story, lynchings were family events. “Some families,” DuRocher shows, even “approached lynchings as a Sunday outing similar to a picnic” (104). Just as the “boisterous play” of the children at the start of “The Lottery” injects a festive element into the murder ritual, lynchings—despite the prolonged torture typically inflicted on victims before they were finally killed—often had a “celebratory atmosphere” and were seen by some families “as entertainment” (DuRocher 103-04). In fact, it was not unusual for parents to send “notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children so that they could attend with the rest of the family” (104). Given the carnival-like atmosphere that enveloped some lynchings, and given the fact that in many instances they offered a break from the tedium of school, it is not a stretch to imagine that many white children—like the children in the lottery—looked forward to the murders. This disturbing notion is evidenced by the “[c]ountless . . . images of lynchings” that “included boys and girls . . . enjoying these public spectacles both during and after the violence” (1).21 And more significantly, given that lynchings were family events and condoned by community leaders, it is no wonder that many white children in the South grew up to see the wanton infliction of violence on African Americans as a normal part of life and even as a civic duty. To again recall Durkheim, the “moral culture” of the Jim Crow South nurtured in white children a “moral disposition inclining to homicide,” which found its enactment in the ritual of lynching.

24“The Lottery” also mirrors how the community-sanctioned violence in lynching played a vital role in fashioning gender roles and constructing the social hierarchy of Southern communities in the Jim Crow era. Just as the lottery in Jackson’s story teaches boys to be an energetic presence in the murder ritual, Southern boys “were expected to actively engage in lynching” (Equal 70), first as helpers of the lynch mob, then in their “early teens” as direct participants in the violence (DuRocher 121). And just as the Watson boy in Jackson’s story dons the mantle of manhood when he draws a lottery slip for his household in front of the whole village, male adolescents in the South “entered manhood” by performing “brutal acts” of violence against African Americans “in front of the community” (DuRocher 121). White girls and women, for their part, were expected, like the girls and women in “The Lottery,” to be submissive in order to conform to the Southern “ideal of female passivity” (118). In so doing, they served several functions in the lynching ritual: first, they played the role of spectators that “white males needed” to validate “their exhibition of masculinity”; second, “by being subordinate to and dependent on white males,” they reinforced the community’s patriarchal hierarchy; and last, their presence highlighted one of the core justifications for lynching, which was to protect white women from the sexual predations of male African Americans and safeguard white female purity (DuRocher 118-19). The killing done in lynchings thus constituted a central ritual of Southern society that functioned not only to terrorize and subjugate African Americans, but also to reproduce the social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South by conditioning each generation of white children to internalize the ideology of white supremacy and its ideals of manhood and femininity.

  • 22 “The main trouble,” Jackson wrote to her agent Bernice Baumgarten, “will lie in making the book not(...)

25Far from being an outlandish tale or one that “is not literally about life in an American village,” “The Lottery” maps onto the ritual of lynching with remarkable precision. If it still seems puzzling why the story makes no mention of race if Jackson intended her tale to have some bearing on the problem of racial violence, the answer is that she probably thought it unnecessary. Such was her reasoning as to why she made no references to McCarthyism in The Witchcraft of Salem: she “thought it was too obvious to mention” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 357).22 Along with this rationale, I would add that directly making the story about the Jim Crow South would limit its power in the same way that pegging it as a New England story limits its scope and force.

Coda: The Enduring Power of “The Lottery”

  • 23 Franklin, in a recent New York Times piece, stresses that “The Lottery” has “retained its relevance (...)

26While lynching may be the most horrific form of community-condoned violence in America, it is certainly not the only one. The enduring power of “The Lottery” is that, as a story designed to be reread, it prompts each generation of readers—as well as prior readers who revisit it at a later day—not only to ponder the root causes of violence, but also to re-examine their own world and recognize “the pointless violence” and “inhumanity” in it.23 The story especially induces readers to examine civically-sanctioned forms of violence of which they may have unthinkingly approved. Shields, for example, has shown that “Jackson’s story prods the reader into confronting the realities of modern execution rituals by presenting a fictional counterpart” that shares surprising similarities with our state-run death penalty executions (416). Like the villagers in “The Lottery,” many Americans have illusions about what they think capital punishment achieves and how fairly it is applied, and simply accept it as “tradition without questioning it” (Shields 416). To recognize, question, and ultimately stop the “pointless violence” in people’s lives are aims that the last sentence of “The Lottery” emphasizes. In this sentence, Tessie utters her final words: “‘It isn’t fair; it isn’t right’” (“Lottery” 302). Some first-time readers of the story might notice that this is the only time Tessie’s protests no longer center on how the lottery was conducted (her husband, she earlier argued, was not given “‘time enough to take the paper he wanted’” [298]), but on whether it is morally “right” (Whittier 360). This shift from “isn’t fair” (a procedural objection) to “isn’t right” (a moral objection) becomes unmistakable in rereading the story as we realize that for Tessie it is a moment of moral revelation, a kind of anagnorisis. It is, of course, a revelation that for her is too late and self-serving; but for each of Jackson’s readers, it should mark the beginning of their own personal revelation about the violence in their world that “isn’t right.”

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Bibliographie

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Shirley Jackson. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. 9-10. Print.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: Applebaum-Century-Crofts, 1959. Print.

Calinescu, Matei. Rereading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Print.

Chihaya, Sarah. “Plural Texts: On Rereading.” American Literary History 34.4 (2022): 1477-85. Print.

Coulthard, A. R. “Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Explicator 48.3 (1990): 226-28. Print.

Durkheim, Emile. Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. 1957. Trans. Cornelia Brookfield. New York: Routledge Classics, 2019. Print.

DuRocher, Kristina. Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2011. Print.

Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. 3rd ed. Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017. Print.

Franklin, Ruth. “75 Years Ago, ‘The Lottery’ Went Viral. There’s a Reason We’re Still Talking about It.” New York Times 26 June 2023. Web. 26 June 2023.

---. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. Print.

Galef, David. “Observations on Rereading.” Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading. Ed. David Galef. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. 17-33. Print.

Griffin, Amy. “Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Explicator 58.1 (1999): 44-46. Print.

Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print.

Heller, Scott. “75 Years After ‘The Lottery’ Was Published, the Chills Linger.” New York Times 26 June 2023. Web. 26 June 2023.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003. Print.

Ifill, Sherrilyn A. On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon P, 2007. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. “Biography of a Story.” Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel. 1968. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin, 1995. 238-52. Print.

---. “The Lottery.” The Lottery; or The Adventures of James Harris. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co., 1949. 291-302. Print.

Kosenko, Peter. “A Marxist/Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” The New Orleans Review 12.1 (1985): 27-32. Print.

Knox, Melissa. “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. 2005. Eds. Jay Parini and Phillip W. Leninger. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Web. 7 Mar. 2023.

Ladenson, Elizabeth. “Rereading Proust: Perversion and Prolepsis in À la recherche du temps perdu.” Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading. Ed. David Galef. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. 249-65. Print.

Lainoff, Seymour. “Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Explicator 12.5 (1953): 74. Print.

Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women’s Initiation. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.

Murphy, Bernice M. “‘The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us’: Shirley Jackson’s New England Gothic.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005. 104-26. Print.

Nebeker, Helen E. “‘The Lottery’: Symbolic Tour de Force.” American Literature 46.1 (1974): 100-08. Print.

Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. “The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in ‘The Lottery.’” Essays in Literature 15.2 (1988): 259-65. Print.

Pfeifer, Michael J. Introduction. Lynching Beyond Dixie: Mob Violence Outside the South. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Print.

Ringel, Faye. “New England Gothic.” A Companion to American Gothic. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 139-50. Print.

---. New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth through the Twentieth Centuries. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Print.

Robinson, Michael. “‘The Lottery’ and Holocaust Literature.” Humanities 8.5 (2019): 1-20. Print.

Shields, Patrick J. “Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Contemporary Justice Review 7.4 (2004): 411-19. Print.

Whittier, Gayle. “‘The Lottery’ as Misogynist Parable.” Women’s Studies 18 (1991): 353-66. Print.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Random House, 2020. Print.

Yarmove, Jay A. “Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” Explicator 52.4 (1994): 242-44. Print.

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Notes

1 Scholarship on “The Lottery” has consistently situated it in New England, often drawing parallels between the world of the story and New England’s Puritan history (e.g., see analyses by Oehlschlaeger, Whittier, and Shields).

2 The only other critic to touch on the topic of rereading “The Lottery” is Helen E. Nebeker. In her article, she never explicitly mentions rereading, but it is clearly implied: she notes that “[o]nly after the initial shock” of reading the story “do disturbing questions . . . assert themselves,” prompting one to discover a “second story . . . beneath the first” (101-02). For Nebeker, this second story involves recognizing symbols, such as the three-legged stool, which represents three religious traditions. The second reading, I argue, is not mainly about discovering symbols, but about understanding the facts of the story differently.

3 These reactions are typical of readers: in “Biography of a Story,” Jackson reports that the flood of letters to The New Yorker (which first published “The Lottery”) written in reaction to her story expressed “bewilderment,” a sense of “shocked innocence,” and fascination (241). Some asked if “stoning still exists in the U.S.A.” and where (243). Many asked what the story means and why it “was published” (246).

4 A recent New York Times article provides eloquent testimonies by readers to the haunting power of “The Lottery,” a power that keeps drawing them back to the text (Heller).

5 Seymour Lainoff noted in 1953 that the lottery is a modern version of a “primitive scapegoat rite,” as defined by James Frazier in The Golden Bough (1890), a book that fascinated Jackson in college and “would greatly influence her” (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 580). The scapegoat rite, says Lainoff, serves a “double purpose: to exorcise the evils of the old year” and “to insure fertility” of the soil (34).

6 Durkheim explained his analysis of the social origins of certain kinds of violence in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, a book based on university lectures presented between 1898 to 1915 and published posthumously, first partly in 1930 and then fully in 1950. In 1957 an English translation was published in America.

7 Peter Kosenko argues that the lottery promotes a strong work ethic by instilling an unconscious belief in the villagers that “a commitment to a work ethic will grant them some magical immunity from selection” in the lottery (28).

8 Other critics who have expressed variations of this view are Lainoff, Brooks and Warren, Coulthard, Griffin, and Franklin (Shirley Jackson 63-64, 224).

9 Kosenko notes that the “children have been socialized into the ideology of the lottery” (32).

10 See Kosenko, Oehlschlaeger, Whittier, and Hattenhauer (44-45).

11 Jackson felt this anti-Semitism from her parents, who opposed her marriage to Hyman (Franklin, Shirley Jackson 129-35).

12 On the story as a critique of McCarthyism, see Whittier (345) and Franklin (Shirley Jackson 235-36). On the theme of antifeminism and patriarchal power, see Kosenko, Oehlschaeger, Whittier, Hall (50, 53), and Hattenhauer (44-45).

13 “Racism and anti-Semitism,” Hattenhauer says, “threatened her [Jackson] personally.” She feared that “provincial racism would infect her children” and knew that married to a Jew, “she and her family would be subject to the Holocaust had they lived in Europe” (21).

14 Here is one scenario that Brooks and Warren suggest as the type of cruelty that, in their view, the story points to: “a man’s patriotism is impugned,” yet his “guiltless wife” is metaphorically “‘stoned’ by her self-righteous neighbors who are acting, of course, out of pure virtue and fervent patriotism” (75).

15 Public executions were rare by the twentieth century (the last was in 1936), but lynchings were not.

16 The authors of Lynching in America “distinguish racial terror lynchings . . . from hangings and mob violence that followed some criminal trial process” (4; their italics).

17 In Lynching Beyond Dixie, Michael J. Pfeifer remarks that in the early 1900s, some observers saw lynching as a “national problem,” but historians, until recently, regarded it as a Southern phenomenon partly because of “the sheer magnitude of violence that occurred” in the South, and partly because of how the discipline of history has been organized along regional lines (2).

18 “Lynch law,” Sherrilyn Ifill explains, “was often regarded by whites as . . . a form of law that had as much legitimacy as the formal codified law of the state’s judicial system” (8).

19 “Caste,” Wilkerson explains, signifies a ranking of human value “that sets the presumed supremacy of one group over another,” and is a “system” pervading all aspects of life in societies where it operates (17-18). She adds that while the terms race and caste overlap, they are not synonymous: “Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become the shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in place. Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition” (19).

20 In “Flower Garden,” when Mrs. MacLane unwittingly challenges the ideology of white supremacy—which, unbeknownst to her, is at the center of the town’s “moral culture”—her penalty is not torture and death, but voluntary expulsion, a kind of social death.

21 DuRocher cites an incident reported by anti-lynching campaigner Walter White, who ran into a group of white children aged nine and younger after the lynching of five African Americans; the children spoke excitedly of their experience (2-3).

22 “The main trouble,” Jackson wrote to her agent Bernice Baumgarten, “will lie in making the book not a comment on the present day; the parallels are uncomfortably close” (qtd. in Franklin, Shirley Jackson 357; her italics).

23 Franklin, in a recent New York Times piece, stresses that “The Lottery” has “retained its relevance across the decades,” especially as a work that seems to shed light on the various problems that each generation has encountered, because of its power “to unsettle” and “disturb” readers (“75 Years”).

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Terence N. Bowers, « Rereading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a Tale of Jim Crow America »Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 | 2022, 241-258.

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Terence N. Bowers, « Rereading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a Tale of Jim Crow America »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 79 | Autumn 2022, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2024, consulté le 20 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3978

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Terence N. Bowers

College of Charleston

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