Literary Criticism of the Lottery, Essay Example

When “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker in June 1948, reader reaction ranged from bewilderment to moral outrage.  Few knew what to make of this strange, disturbing tale.  Over the years, literary criticism has varied widely in seeking to explain the meaning behind “The Lottery.”Reviewers have exploredalienation, the function of ritual in modern society, the exploitative and still-patriarchal nature of gender relations, anti-capitalist ideology and many otherwide-ranging themes.

In a 1985 article entitled “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery,” author Peter Kosenko said the capitalistic implications of Jackson’s story have been overlooked.  The lottery is administered by Mr. Summers, the town’s wealthiest businessman; Mr. Graves, the government official; and Mr. Martin, who owns the grocery.  These representatives of the town’s power base take turns keeping the lottery box, the true symbol of their power.  Each year, Mr. Summers, the lottery’s presiding officer, is sworn in by Mr. Graves.  The two draw up the lottery slips and Mr. Martin steadies the box as Summers stirs the fateful lots.

Kosenko points out that this symbolic tacit union between business and government  typifiescapitalist society.  When the men make small talk, it’s about financial matters.  “More importantly, however, the village exhibits the same socio-economic stratification that most people take for granted in a modern, capitalist society” (p. 27, Kosenko).

Kosenko’s description of the separation between the privileged few and “hoi polloi”of the village leads to one of his most illustrative observations.  The traditional and unquestioned role of the lottery’s administrators stands in stark counterpoint to the place occupied by the vulnerable townsfolk, who mislead themselves that everyone takes the same chance because “a Democratic illusion of the lottery diverts their attention from the capitalist economic relations in which these relations of power are grounded”  (p. 29, Kosenko).

The village’s patriarchal hierarchy has the appearance of post-war capitalist society, with women dressed in faded work clothes following along dutifully behind their men.  Tessie Hutchinson, having arrived late for the lottery begins to protest, desperately, even defiantly.  In the end, it’s not surprising that fate selects herin a kind of karmic denouement to her impotent protests.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right” Tessie cries as she’s being stoned, but this last futile outburst lacks moral force. “Tessie does not object to the lottery per se, only to her own selection as its scapegoat.  It would have been fine with her if someone else had been selected” (p. 31, Kosenko).

Jackson doubtless often felt like a scapegoat during her years in Bennington, Vermont, the town that provided the inspiration for the village in her story.  In Jonathan Lethem’s 1997 article “Monstrous Facts and Little Murders,” Jonathan Lethem said Jackson was profoundly alienated from the stodgy, New England provincialism that surrounded her and deeply affected the psyche of a naturally shy person.

The residents of Bennington were uneasy about Jackson’s fame.  Lethem wrote that after the success of “The Lottery,” an apocryphal story circulated around town that Jackson had been “pelted with stones by schoolchildren,” after which she supposedly wrote “The Lottery” (Lethem).  True or not, she lived the life of an outsider in Bennington.  The psychological effects of her life there may be debatable, but it’s true that late in life she battled agoraphobia.

Jackson’s husband, literary critic Stanley Edward Hyman, taught at Bennington College.  Lethem notes that Jackson was exposed to the bad opinion of the townsfolk in a way that her husband, literary critic Stanley Edward Hyman, was not.  Hyman, a Jewish intellectual from New York, was comparatively insulated from day-to-day stresses by the college’s academic environment.  “It was Jackson’s fate, as a faculty wife and an eccentric newcomer in a staid, insular village, to absorb the reflexive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college” (Lethem).

Jackson’s relationship to Bennington was complex and emotionally costly but in many ways it was an ideal setting for her unique literary perspective.  Jackson, Lethem wrote, was drawn to “the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind” (Lethem).

The subsuming of self in a community has ominous implications, the effects of which were almost commonplace in the 20^th century.  Nazi Germany, America’s Communist purges of the 1950s…these are the results of what Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in their review of “The Lottery,” called “the all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat,” and to impart “cruelties that most of us seem to have dammed up within us” (p. 72-6, Brooks and Warren).

In her 1974 review, “The Lottery:’ Symbolic Tour de Force,” Helen Nebeker says Jackson employs a sub-theme, one in which symbolism shows the lottery to be an ancientritualistic tradition that generates violence, rather than an annual event that provides some psychological outlet for repressed violent aggression.  “Man is not at the mercy of a murky, savage id; he is thevictim of unexamined and unchanging traditions which he could easily change if he onlyrealized their implications. Herein is horror” (p. 100, Nebeker).

In the story’s climax, friendly Mrs. Delacroix selects a stone so large she needs both hands to pick it up – and encourages others to do likewise.  Delacroix, translated as ”of-the-cross,” hints at Christianity’s complicity in humanity’s violent past.  It is this blend of symbolism and matter-of-fact violence, set against the backdrop of everyday village life that, gives “The Lottery”its visceral power.

Symbolic ritualism was, of old, man’s pathway to understanding and controlling external forces.  Nebekerexplains that sacrificial victims of such rituals have always been seen as saviors, noble supplicants who mediated on behalf of the greater good.  But in “The Lottery”there are indications that, to some, this tradition has come to exist only for its own sake.  As the crowd awaits the drawing, one comments that it seems as though there had just been a lottery, another says, quietly, that she hopes it won’t be her (p. 103, Nebeker).

Nebeker says the most important symbol of all is the three-legged stool, which supports the blood-stained lottery box.  It is the symbol of unexamined, unquestioned tradition, representing thousands of years of human suffering.

In “The Lottery – A Critical Essay,” Joan Wylie Hall explores the thesis that the village has advanced to the point where the lottery exists only to further a truly primitive tradition of violence.

“With its post office, bank, coal business, and grocery store, the village economy may have grown enough beyond its agricultural foundation to weaken an earlier faith in the necessity of fertility ceremonies” (p. 96, Hall).

Nevertheless, the lottery is so utterly ingrained in the village’s communal psychethatwhen Tessie refuses to hand over her lot, her husband doesn’t hesitate to force the paper from her hand, revealing the fatal black spot.  Her older children are too relieved not to have been chosen to express concern for her fate (p. 96, Hall).  And in one of the most horrific twists in modern American literature little David Hutchinson, Tessie’s youngest child, has a pocket full of rocks, ready to throw.

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn. Understanding Fiction, 3^rd Edition, Prentice Hall, 1959.

Hall, Joan Wylie. “Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction,”Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Kosenko, Peter.  “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery,” The New Orleans Review, March 1985, 27-32.

Lethem, Jonathon.  “Monstrous Facts and Little Murders,” 1997.                                                 <http://www.salon.com/jan97/jackson2970106.html>.

Nebeker, Helen E. “The Lottery: Symbolic Tour de Force,” American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1, March 1974, 100-107.