Some of you may recall from high school or college English classes a short story which appeared almost exactly 60 years ago, in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker. To add to the sense of anniversary, the opening words of the story are:
"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."
As some of you have figured out, the story is "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson. At the time, the reaction to it was nothing less than utter shock and outrage from many readers, because of the story's ending. (There was one reaction more like awe, mentioned in the main diary below the flip.) For those who have read it, you know what that ending is. For those who may have not, spoiler alert, after a fashion. With that said....
Prior to "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson had published a number of stories in The New Yorker. Searching TNY's on-line archive, the list of her short stories is listed, with links to TNY's abstracts that give cursory plot summaries (the one for "The Lottery" hints at the ending in an extremely flat, deadpan manner):
(1) 'After You, My Dear Alphonse' (January 16, 1943)
(2) 'Come Dance With Me In Ireland' (May 15, 1943)
(3) 'Afternoon in Linen' (September 4, 1943)
(4) 'On the House' (October 30, 1943)
(5) 'A Fine Old Firm' (March 4, 1944)
(6) 'Colloquy' (August 5, 1944)
(7) 'Trial by Combat' (December 16, 1944)
(8) 'When Things Get Dark' (December 30, 1944)
(9) 'Whistler's Grandmother' (May 5, 1945)
(10) 'The Lottery' (June 26, 1948)
(11) 'An International Incident' (September 12, 1953)
In her book Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, Judy Oppenheimer says that Jackson wrote "The Lottery" very quickly:
"....'The Lottery' was written on a spring day in 1948, after the author returned from doing her daily errands in North Bennington, Vt., where she lived with her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the two children that had been born to them so far. It took her less than two hours to complete it, but the poet Ben Belitt, a colleague of her husband's on the faculty of Bennington College, immediately recognized it as 'the pure thing...the real, right immortal thing...the mythic thing you find in Greek literature.'"
Citation: NYT, review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, 7/7/1988
'The Lottery' generated over 300 reader letters to The New Yorker, which sent all of them to Jackson. Some of the hostile comments are as follows:
"Tell Miss Jackson to stay out of Canada."
"I expect a personal apology from the author."
"I will never buy The New Yorker again. I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like 'The Lottery'."
"The story was so horrible and gruesome in its effect that I could hardly see the point of your publishing it."
"We would expect something like this in Esquire, etc., but not the New Yorker."
"Never in the world did I think I'd protest a story in the New Yorker, but really, gentlemen, 'The Lottery' seems to be to be in incredibly bad taste. I read it while soaking in the tub and was tempted to put my head under the water and end it all."
Citation: About Town, Ben Yagoda, Scribner (2000), p. 232.
I read it in grade school, but as I recall, I didn't really have a clue about the subtext. In 1988, one gentleman recalled in an NYT letter to the editor asking Jackson for the story's meaning:
"When I read 'The Lottery' in The New Yorker I thought it was a great story.
Although to me 'The Lottery' meant that people are capable of inhuman violence and bigotry, I was still a little unsure of its meaning. So, I wrote to Shirley shortly after I read her story:
'Dear Shirley, I read 'The Lottery.' What does it mean?'
I received her answer, short and direct, on a postcard:
'Dear Mr. O'Shaughnessy,
I wish I knew.
Shirley Jackson.'
Jack O'Shaughnessy
Columbus, Ohio
August 28, 1988
Given the nature of the story, however, it's a fair understatement to posit that Jackson was being disingenuous and evasive, if in a witty manner to O'Shaughnessy. In her review of Oppenheimer's book, Elizabeth Frank points out one idea in the back of Jackson's mind as a possible inspiration, namely the bigotry Jackson encountered from relatives and college classmates when they learned that Jackson wanted to marry Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was Jewish:
"Both sets of parents were horrified when the couple announced their plans to marry, and Shirley's Syracuse housemates warned her about life with a Jew. She was deeply shaken by this first exposure to anti-Semitism, and later confided to a friend that 'The Lottery' was about the Jews."
Yet I'm not sure that this is quite true, or if this were indeed true, this is a more disturbing interpretation than it seems. This is because the person who becomes "the chosen one" (anyone know the classical music reference?) is not some hated or demonized outsider who is scapegoated for imagined or false "crimes". "The chosen one" is simply one of the village's own citizens, no better or worse than any other - except, perhaps, when she begins to whine in protest when her family is initially chosen in the "first round". Joyce Carol Oates expressed the idea in her review of an anthology of Jackson's prior uncollected writings by two of Jackson's children, Just an Ordinary Day:
"It is a measure of Shirley Jackson's sardonic perspective that their annual victim is simply one of them - not a redeemer or an innocent or even a nonconformist. Singled out....the victim protests not the madness of the lottery but her own bad luck. Like such American Gothic classics as "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. P. Lovecraft's ''Rats in the Walls,'' ''The Lottery'' yields a singular, unforgettable nightmare image."
In a way, Tess Hutchinson, said victim, shows something that isn't perhaps quite hypocrisy, but perhaps complacency, in the events before she becomes "the chosen one". Earlier in the story, she's chatting happily with a fellow villager, as someone who has survived the yearly ritual so far. It is only when her family, and finally she herself, has been selected, utterly at random, that the full import of the ritual dawns on her. What happens at the end is shocking, but because she had made it through year after year, she didn't really think much about it, nor, one suspects, did the other villagers. It is only when the event is brought home directly that she starts to break out of her complacency, not necessarily coming to an empathetic understanding of what this must have meant to the "chosen ones" in the past. In brief, for Tess Hutchinson, after years of dodging the bullet, her luck finally ran out, as she screams at the end:
"It ain't fair, it isn't right"
What happens at the end of the story isn't "right", by any means. But because of the truly random way "the chosen one" is picked every year, the lottery is, in its terrifying way and in a detached, statistical sense, "fair". Ben Yagoda himself summed up the story thus, with more than a nod to Hannah Arendt:
"In fact, 'The Lottery' - with its New England villagers, so quaint and so ready to commit unspeakable acts - was about evil: its familiarity, its banality, and its capacity to appear at the least expected places and times."
Citation: About Town, p. 232
So, back to days of high school English for this SNLC. Or you can just observe the usual SNLC protocol below, with loser stories for the week welcome. Have fun.....