The Lottery (1948). Detailed description

In an age where lottery denotes legal gambling in the form of a public competition, often with scratch-off playing cards and ping-pong machines that mix numbered balls into winning combinations, the significance of Shirley Jackson’s short story title may easily be lost. While “casting lots” is mentioned in the Bible and door-prize drawings existed in ancient Rome, modern lottery competitions date back to 17th-century Europe. Jackson’s account, however, is both ironic and also macabre.

An account of a yearly corn-planting ritual in which the winner of a chance drawing is stoned to death, “The Lottery” initially baffled readers when it appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of the New Yorker. In fact, the story elicited so many letters inquiring about its meaning that Jackson lampooned the letters in a satirical lecture, “Biography of a Story,” which later appeared in Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (1959).

Many critics deal with the story as a kind of anthropological treatise on scapegoating, with the one who is stoned taking on the sins of the society as a means of expiation. Further, since Helen E. Nebeker’s March 1974 essay, “ ‘The Lottery’: Symbolic Tour de Force,’” many critics have focused on the story’s symbolism, the way virtually every detail in the story can be said to signify something meaningful, something hinting at a large story behind the story, an allegory that might unlock what Jackson intended.

While such cat-and-mouse games make up much literary criticism, Jackson’s defense of the story probably says more about readers’ need for closure and explication than anything Jackson intended. For Jackson, in her many defenses to her editors and to the many audiences that listened to her speak about the story, contended that “The Lottery” was written quickly and easily, and that, while there might be many possibilities for interpreting it, as readers and critics have speculated over the years, she did not intend them:

Things began mildly enough with a note from a friend at The New Yorker: “Your story has kicked up quite a fuss around the office,” he wrote. I was flattered; it’s nice to think that your friends notice what you write. Later that day there was a call from one of the magazine’s editors; they had had a couple of people phone in about my story, he said, and was there anything I particularly wanted him to say if there were more calls? No, I said, nothing particular; anything he chose to say was perfectly all right with me; it was just a story.” (Come Along with Me 212)

Whether Jackson intended for readers to stew over this classic American horror tale or not, readers and critics continue to vie for interpretive mastery of the story. Perhaps what the story precisely means is ultimately unimportant. What is important is that the story, in its strangeness, has led generations to question its purpose, ponder its meaning, and to come up with myriad ways of understanding its significance. Rather than tell us what we are to think, “The Lottery” show us human beings caught up in a deadly game, one that mirrors the many social rituals that define much of our lives.

For Discussion or Writing
1. From one perspective, “The Lottery” deals with tradition, those customs and rituals handed down that we hold as vital and often perform routinely and without thinking. Such American traditions include the rituals of organized religions of varying denominations, New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebration of carnival, the Indy 500, and a host of “reality” television shows that reward some and disenfranchise others. Incorporating several American traditions, write a well-developed essay on the use and abuse of tradition in “The Lottery” and in American society.

2. Write a well-developed essay on the role of women in the story and the implications of gender roles in the story. Be sure to consider the sociological context of the 1940s and 1950s as you discuss a central idea about Jackson’s representation of gender in the story.