The Lottery

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"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson, first published in the June 28, 1948 issue of The New Yorker. The only change New Yorker editors made to Jackson's original manuscript was to alter the date in the story to make it one day before the date of the magazine's publication.

The magazine and Jackson herself were surprised by the highly negative reader response. Many readers cancelled their subscriptions, and hate mail continued to arrive throughout the summer. In South Africa the story was banned. Since then, it has been accepted as a classic American short story, subject to many critical interpretations and media adaptations.

Plot summary

The story contrasts commonplace details of contemporary life with a barbaric ritual known as the "lottery." The setting is a small American town (pop. 300) where the locals display a weird mood, which you could see the unusual things, like child gathering stones..... as they gather on June 27 for their annual lottery. After a person from each family draws a small piece of paper, one slip with a black spot indicates the Hutchinson family has been chosen. When each member of that family draws again to see which family member "wins," Tessie Hutchinson is the final choice. She is then stoned by everyone present, including her own family and the young men as well as young girls.

Controversy

Controversy surrounding the story brought an overwhelming amount of mail, phone calls and hundreds of cancelled subscriptions. In Private Demons, Jackson's biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, wrote, "Nothing in the magazine before or since would provoke such a huge outpouring of fury, horror, rage, disgust and intense fascination."

Amid the optimism of the post-WWII years, many readers of family magazines were shocked or confused to find the traditions and values of small town America twisted into violence. Some believed Jackson had based the short story on true events that had happened or were still happening in a real American town.

Rarely mentioned in essays and discussions of the story is the fact that, during the late 1940s, crowds gathered at town squares in rural communities across the country to participate in weekly cash-prize lotteries, calculated by city councils to drum up business for local merchants. Such a lottery was held on the lawn of the courthouse square in Lexington, Mississippi, in the post-war years, and New Yorker subscribers who had witnessed similar small-town gatherings perhaps began reading "The Lottery" with a notion that the story was a fictionalization of those cash drawings.

Many readers demanded an explanation of the situation described in the story, and a month after the initial publication, Shirley Jackson responded in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 22, 1948):

Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont, and her comment reveals she had Bennington in mind when she wrote "The Lottery." In a 1960 lecture (printed in her 1968 collection, Come Along with Me), Jackson recalled the hate mail she received in 1948:

The New Yorker kept no records of the phone calls, but letters addressed to Jackson were forwarded to her. That summer she began to regularly take home 10 to 12 forwarded letters each day. In addition, she also received weekly packages from The New Yorker containing letters and questions addressed to the magazine or editor Harold Ross, plus carbons of the magazine's responses mailed to letter writers.

In The Magic of Shirley Jackson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote about her reaction to the banning of the story in the Union of South Africa: "She felt that they at least understood." In 1984, The Lottery was included among the 30 most-often banned books in American schools and libraries, as listed by Playboy (January, 1984). The books were arranged by frequency of censorship with the most-banned first, the least-banned last. At that time, The Lottery ranked #17, between Black Like Me and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Critical interpretations

Mr. Summers, Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin are the village's most important men. With a successful coal business, Summers can be viewed as the leader of this closely knit community where men dominate the women. The women are apparently satisfied with their position in the social ladder. Tessie assents to the idea of the lottery until she is selected as the person to be killed, screaming, "It isn't fair." Tessie's sudden change of heart upon having her own name chosen serves to highlight the hypocrisy of a society in which violence is accepted until it becomes personal. Except for Mr. and Mrs. Adams' words to Old Man Warner, there is no notion of ending the lottery. It is an ingrained ritual, and the villagers regard industrious labor to be a magical protection against being chosen, as indicated by the Old Man Warner, never selected during his 77 years. When Mrs. Adams tells Warner that some of the other villages have stopped holding the annual lotteries, he replies, "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." He is a traditionalist who views the annual event as a way of life. His comment about those contemplating an end to the lottery: "Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while." Summers, whose opinion takes precedence, doesn’t feel the need to oppose the lottery, and the villagers are all inclined to continue the tradition.

Helen E. Nebeker's essay, "The Lottery: Symbolic Tour de Force" in American Literature (March, 1974) reveals that every major name in the story has a special significance:

By the end of first two paragraphs, Jackson has carefully indicated the season, time of ancient excess and sacrifice, and the stones, most ancient of sacrificial weapons. She has also hinted at larger meanings through name symbology. "Martin," Bobby’s surname, derives from a Middle English word signifying ape or monkey. This, juxtaposed with "Harry Jones" (in all its commonness) and "Dickie Delacroix" (of-the-Cross) urges us to an awareness of the Hairy Ape within us all, veneered by a Christianity as perverted as "Delacroix," vulgarized to "Dellacroy" by the villagers. Horribly, at the end of the story, it will be Mrs. Delacroix, warm and friendly in her natural state, who will select a stone "so large she had to pick it up with both hands" and will encourage her friends to follow suit... "Mr. Adams," at once progenitor and martyr in the Judeo-Christian myth of man, stands with "Mrs. Graves"—the ultimate refuge or escape of all mankind—in the forefront of the crowd.

Felix Oehlshlaeger, in "The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning of Context in The Lottery" (Essays in Literature, 1988), wrote:

The name of Jackson's victim links her to Anne Hutchinson, whose Antinomian beliefs, found to be heretical by the Puritan hierarchy, resulted in her banishment from Massachusetts in 1638. While Tessie Hutchinson is no spiritual rebel, to be sure, Jackson's allusion to Anne Hutchinson reinforces her suggestions of a rebellion lurking within the women of her imaginary village. Since Tessie Hutchinson is the protagonist of "The Lottery", there is every indication that her name is indeed an allusion to Anne Hutchinson, the American religious dissenter. She was excommunicated despite an unfair trial, while Tessie questions the tradition and correctness of the lottery as well as her humble status as a wife. It might as well be this insubordination that leads to her selection by the lottery and stoning by the angry mob of villagers.

In "A Reading of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"' (New Orleans Review, Spring 1985) Peter Kosenko provides a Marxist interpretation of the story that brings all of Jackson's details together into a critique of capitalism.

Media adaptations

In addition numerous reprints in magazines, anthologies and textbooks, "The Lottery" has been adapted for radio, live television, a 1953 ballet, a 1969 film short, a TV movie, an opera and a one-act play. NBC's radio adaptation was broadcast March 14, 1951 as an episode of the anthology series, NBC Short Story. Ellen M. Violett wrote the first television adaptation, seen on Albert McCleery's Cameo Theatre (1950–1955). Currently, the Acting Company offers a one-act production, directed by Douglas Mercer and adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, which can be staged in school classrooms.

Larry Yust's short film, The Lottery (1969), produced as part of the Encyclopædia Britannica's "Short Story Showcase" series, was ranked by the Academic Film Archive "as one of the two bestselling educational films ever". It has an accompanying ten-minute commentary film, "Discussion of The Lottery" by USC English professor Dr. James Durbin. Featuring the film debut of Ed Begley, Jr., Yust's adaptation has an atmosphere of naturalism and small town authenticity with its shots of pick-up trucks and townspeople in Fellows, California. The film has had many school showings in the United States, yet it encountered resistance in Massachusetts. Although the Encyclopædia Britannica series of classic short stories was approved by the board of Massachusetts Educational Television, Yust's film was eliminated from Massachusetts showings of the series by MET board members.

Firesign Theatre produced a 30 minute RCA/Columbia Pictures video EAT OR BE EATEN in 1985, chronicaling a day in the life of Labyrinth, a mythical town that holds a lottery to choose a virgin scrifice to the koodzoo vine. Doesn't claim to be based on The Lottery but could be argued to contain similar aspects.

Anthony Spinner adapted the story into a feature-length TV movie, The Lottery, which premiered September 29, 1996, on NBC. As expanded by Spinner, the annual lottery is held for religious reasons, and the thriller storyline highlights a love story with the crazed townsfolk and the sadistic lottery as the backdrop. Director Daniel Sackheim filmed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with a cast that included Keri Russell, Dan Cortese, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Corey, Salome Jens and M. Emmet Walsh. It was nominated for a 1997 Saturn Award for Best Single Genre Television Presentation.

The music videos for the songs "Man That You Fear" by Marilyn Manson, and "Pioneers" by From Autumn To Ashes—are based upon "The Lottery." The song "Red Lottery" by Megasus that is featured in Guitar Hero II is based upon "The Lottery".

The most recent adaptation is an 11-minute short film, The Lottery, directed by Augustin Kennady on location in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania for Aura Pictures Limited. Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick and his parents portray the Hutchinson family.

The idea was adapted in an episode of Sliders called "Luck of the Draw". In the episode, the sliders land in a world where people who win the lottery get killed as well as get money, in order to control the population.

In an episode of Adult Swim's Squidbillies series villain Dan Halen fixes the lottery so that Early Cuyler wins an actual copy of the book, he eventually tries to execute Granny but instead of stoning her to death he attempts to have her ripped apart by monster trucks.

Listen to

References

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988.

External links

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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 19:59:08 PDT (GMT -0700)
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