Shirley Jackson: "The Lottery"

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 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; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders. The babies rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

­Shirley Jackson was a kind of anthropologist; she enjoyed watching humans behaving. So, in this horror story, “The Lottery,” we get a density of detail that we might not get elsewhere. Liberty is actually unsettling; the children are quiet with each other, at first, as if they have forgotten how to play. They enjoy griping about the teacher; though they might claim to dislike the prison that is school, they keep revisiting that prison, in their minds, in the summer. There is sneakiness and competition and the puffing up of egos; even a murder weapon—a stone—is a kind of status symbol, because of its smoothness and roundness. The youngest kids, not yet sophisticated enough for conversation or group activities, simply “roll in the dust,” like pill bugs, or find the familiar bodily warmth of a brother or sister. (One of Jackson’s great gifts was for chilling understatement; here, for example, we find a reference to the upcoming stoning, then we move right back into an adorable description of chatting girls and clinging babies. Think of this line from one of Jackson’s early poems: “The papers said/ You would be home by summer. When you come/ Bring nothing for the baby. He is dead./ The work will be less hard when you are home/ But I’m afraid the season will be late/ For growing things.” Or think of these early lines from “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”: “I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Philleides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen table, they were more than five months overdue….” The upsetting bit sits quietly between two pedestrian observations; life just comes at you, relentlessly, and there generally aren’t flags to indicate when some seriously troubling data-point is on its way. Also, the calm, blasé naming of a horrendous fact suggests to us that our narrator is insane; the insanity is enacted, not described. Our hair stands on end. Suddenly, we are paying close attention.)

The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people felt sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold….When he arrived in the square, he called, “Little late today, folks.” ….And when Mr. Summers said, “Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?” there was a hesitation before two men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

Jackson very much loved irony and tension. Mr. Summers is a well-liked figure, but secretly the villagers feel sorry for him—the childlessness, the scolding wife. (Don’t you know this figure from your office? People are just slightly more jocular with him, because they find him weak, even if they haven’t acknowledged the fact to themselves.) Mr. Summers’s first words are a pseudo-apology—“Little late today, folks”—and we have the sense that Mr. Summers is maybe always half-apologizing, maybe always half-accounting for behaviors that are just slightly inadequate. There’s a wordless hesitation before anyone assists Mr. Summers, and I love this hesitation. I love it because it suggests, very quietly, that characters’ feelings are at odds with their actions; there’s a great deal of spirited talk about tradition and its value, in this story, but really the characters would prefer not to stir up the papers in the lottery box. Also, I sense a bit of Jackson’s lovely wickedness in her observation; when can you guarantee for yourself a sighting of hesitation? When one person asks for assistance from a member—any single member—of a large crowd. (“Maybe my neighbor will raise his hand first.”)

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking…Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path….”Clean forgot what day it was,” she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. “Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,” Mrs. Hutchinson went on. “And then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running.” She dried her hands, and Mrs. Delacroix said, “You’re in time, though. They’re still talking away up there.”

This enchanting dialogue is 100-percent perverse. As if the villagers would allow a fellow citizen to miss this lottery! As if anyone would say—“Ah, Tessie is absent this year, but we’ll let it slide.” And as if the fact of being on time is something to feel reassured about! (Wouldn’t saner words be: “Get the hell out! Run and don’t look back!”) I love the very subtle indication of tension within Tessie’s soul; did she really forget what day it was? Had one half of her lied to the other half, out of an urge toward self-preservation? Or is her entire speech to Mrs. Delacroix a lie? Does Mrs. Delacroix recognize the lie—and is the “soft laughter” a way of papering over some social awkwardness? Mrs. Hutchinson is already in a nightmare; ignored by her (self-absorbed) husband and children, she is marching toward her own death. People think of the stoning as the horrific act in this story—but the psychological torture of 10 AM through 10:30 AM—the waiting and waiting to hear the details of the stoning—this seems almost as excruciating to me. And of course, if you lived in this town, you’d carry the burden of thoughts of the lottery all throughout the year, morning, noon, and night. The suffering of the mind almost matches the suffering of the body—though a stoning is obviously more visually striking than a nervous breakdown.

Well, I’ll keep on going tomorrow. Clearly, I’m excited to go to work today—if I woke up thinking about an old American literary chestnut that concerns ritual violence and Kafka-esque psychological warfare. Carry on! Happy Tuesday!