Killing in The Lottery - Research Paper Example

?598620 The killing in “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a ic short story that has been taught in high schools and universities since its publication in 1948. It remains an important piece of fiction because of its resonance with the human consciousness. While it is a simple story, with a straight forward story line, and not long in length, its subject matter touches on some primitive part of the human makeup that no matter how grisly the events of the story are, they still stir the senses of readers. Not many can ever forget the story once they have read it even though it is clearly fictional, and not really very believable. Such an event as a lottery to determine who will be stoned to death seems unthinkable today, yet the people in the story seem so realistic, so reasonable. That may be why the story resonates with readers. Some part of them believes this sacrifice could happen because it has. Maybe the story resonates because it represents the regular and ritualized sacrifice one group of people must make to appease another. Parallels can be drawn between ritualized scapegoating in “The Lottery” and several historical events. Perhaps “The Lottery” influences a part of the human consciousness that would perform such an act as stoning a person to death for no other reason than it is what has always been done. That sort of story remains in the memory of readers for the rest of their lives. Humans once believed that sacrificing someone to the gods might help them have a good harvest. People in ancient times without the advancements of scientific thought believed the sacrificial scapegoat took on the sins and ills of the world, yet many still believe such a thing is possible. Some believe that it occurred 2000 years ago in the form of Jesus’ crucifixion. Since that time, other scapegoats have also emerged, some in the form of entire groups of people. While people in modern times call this ritualized victimization many other things besides scapegoating, it boils down to the same cruel act. So the ritualized killing of one farmer’s wife in Shirley Jackson’s short story does not appall readers perhaps as much as it should, but it does remind them of the primitive parts of their inheritance. The events in “The Lottery” fall under Sir James George Frazer’s definition of scapegoating. The townspeople select a person by random drawing to be stoned to death. Readers must wonder why and Frazer offers an explanation. “The primitive principle of the transference of ills to another person, animal, or thing . . . [has] been adopted to free a whole community from diverse evils that afflict it. Such attempts to dismiss at once the accumulated sorrows of a people are by no means rare or exceptional; on the contrary they have been made in many lands, and from being occasional they tend to become periodic and annual” (Frazer, Chapter 56: The Public Expulsion of Evils). Frazer concedes that scapegoating is not an isolated practice of just the heathen as he would imply in other parts of his book, The Golden Bough, but practiced the world round, even in the United States, where “The Lottery” appears to be set. The lottery in Shirley Jackson’s story is held annually, on June 27th like the annual sacrifice Frazer writes about. In fact, the date and the periodic interval are important enough that it occupies the first lines of the story. 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. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner. (Jackson) Besides placing the lottery in a time setting and demonstrating its occurrence at regular intervals, this opening paragraph accomplishes other important parts of the narrative. First of all it provides a time frame for the events of the story (from 10 a.m. until noon). Presumably, the drawing takes place, the scapegoat is stoned to death, and everybody is home in time for lunch except, of course, the dead scapegoat. The first paragraph of the story also establishes that this is not an isolated event occurring only in the town where the story is set. Apparently, it also occurs in towns with enough population that it takes two days to find the scapegoat after the drawing has taken place. This first paragraph also shows how commonplace the lottery feels to this group of people who have experienced it once a year for all of their lives. It establishes the practice as normal and not extraordinary as it would be to most people outside of the fictional setting of the short story. Such an event, if it were to occur today, would not seem commonplace nor would it go unnoticed by other communities. With the prevalence of media such as 24-hour cable news, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones with video cameras and YouTube, everyone would certainly know of its occurrence and presumably stop it from happening. However, if every community in the entire country were to practice the ritualized scapegoating and killing of one of its citizens chosen by random, no one would stop it because it would be part of the national identity. If this were an annual occurrence as it is in Jackson’s short story, then it would be observed in the same way that annual holidays are observed. Perhaps it would be akin to something like Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November or Independence Day on the 4th of July since these are holidays celebrated in America for Americans and are not exclusive to a religion or ethnic group. Most Americans do not question the killing of millions of turkeys for the Thanksgiving feast or the use of explosives to represent the sacrifices of war in celebration of their independence, and they would not question the random, ritual killing of a person in their community if such events were to occur on an annual basis. This is perhaps partly at least the point Jackson is making: certain types of scapegoating have become so commonplace that even though some people feel uncomfortable with it, they do not speak out about it. In the ancient past, the killing of scapegoats did occur with regularity. Frazer notes, “In civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker forms . . . .Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice and pure food. At the expiry of the year he . . . .was then cast out of the city or stoned to death by the people outside of the walls” (Chapter 58: Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity). This type of scapegoat volunteered himself. The people in “The Lottery,” in an indirect way, also volunteer themselves: they show up for the ritual and passively demonstrate their compliance with it perhaps because they believe if they do not something worse will befall them. If they collectively decided not to participate, it seems as if the ritual would end. They cannot individually leave the town to escape the killing because in the context of the story, they would have nowhere to go that did not practice the lottery. The only way to stop it would be an organized rebellion against it. Yet there are some forces that make the people of the town in the story, and presumably in every community, persist in the brutality. Some ancient cultures, such as the Athenians, rather than sacrificing one of their own, purposely kept “degraded and useless” people captive until they needed a scapegoat on which to place all of their ill luck. However, it was not just the ridding of bad luck that prompted the sacrificing of a fellow citizen. It was also the belief that a preemptive sacrifice would bring about good luck too. “But such sacrifices were not confined to extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death. The city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others” (Frazer, Chapter 58: Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity). “The Lottery” details a stoning that occurs in late June, just in time for the summer growing season. Perhaps that is the reasoning used to justify the ritualized killing in the story: the preemptive sacrifice of a randomly selected person would bring good luck in the harvest. The town in which “The Lottery” is set is clearly a town with an economy tied to agriculture. When the people begin to assemble for the drawing, the men speak “of planting and rain, tractors and taxes” (Jackson). Readers may picture it somewhere in the Midwest where, at one time, agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, but some place it in New England from whence Jackson hailed. Regardless of what part of the country the story is set, it portrays people who rely on the farm for their living and who must also rely on the. They must hope that there will be no tornadoes or hurricanes, no locust swarms to demolish their crops, and no blight to spread from farm to farm and wipe out the entire community’s livelihood. With the advent of science, especially agricultural science, people have figured out ways to combat, prevent, and survive such natural disasters, but there was a time in human history when the best a person could expect was to pray to whatever gods he worshipped and hope they were listening. In ancient Greece, apparently they thought sacrificing a human to the gods would help to assure that they were. “At an earlier time they [scapegoats] may have been looked on as embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of the corn but particularly of the fig-trees; and that the beating which they received and the death which they died were intended primarily to brace and refresh the powers of vegetation” (Frazer, Chapter 58: Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity). While the notion of human sacrifices to the gods affecting the crops eventually went away, perhaps with the advent of Christianity, the notion of a human scapegoat did not. Christianity’s main theme is the human scapegoat in the form of Jesus on the cross dying for the sins of the people. Nathan Cervo, in an Explicator article, points out that there are several clues in Jackson’s story pointing to the biblical reference. For instance, one cannot help but to think of the New Testament story of Mary Magdalene about to be stoned by a crowd for being a prostitute when Jesus steps in and delivers the famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Another more direct reference in the story occurs in the name of one of the families in the town, Delacroix, which translated, means “of the cross.” The lottery also takes place on the 27th day, which is 9 three times, and represents the Holy Trinity according to Cervo. But, Cervo’s most convincing correlation between Jackson’s story and the biblical era of Jesus comes in the description of the ritualized sacrificing of a goat. “The Day of Atonement lottery, most particularly as practiced in the days of Jesus. . . . involved two goats; namely, the scapegoat (the goat that was not sacrificed) and the goat to be sacrificed to Jehovah as a sin offering. This latter goat was customarily hurled down a rocky precipice (hence, the twin motifs of stoning and the implicit idea, in Jackson's story” (Cervo). A part of the ritual that Cervo describes requires the drawing of lots to determine which goat is sacrificed. “Now the high priest comes to the front of the altar, and a priest holds out to him the gold box, wherein are the ‘lots,’ on one is written: ‘For Jehovah,’ on the other ‘For Azazael’” (Cervo). It is easy to see the correlation between the ancient gold box containing the lots to draw for the goat sacrifice to the black box in which the slips of paper are placed determining the fate of one of the townspeople in Jackson’s short story. In Christianity, Jesus is often depicted as the sacrificial lamb, or the scapegoat, taking on death so that humans can have eternal life. However, this has not stopped Christians from finding scapegoats on which to blame their ills. For instance, people of the Jewish faith have been persecuted for centuries because of their alleged role in the crucifixion of Jesus. The culmination of that scapegoating occurred in modern times in Europe with the Holocaust, when most of the world stood back and refused to become involved in the horrific events, including the ritualized killing of millions of Jews that occurred under a Nazi regime. Europeans and Americans alike turned a blind eye to the deportation of millions of Jews until they were forced to look in horror at the carnage after Germany was defeated. As Hitler marched across Europe capturing countries, more Jews were rounded up, shipped to concentration camps, and annihilated in the gas chambers. In the meantime, most of Europe and the United States did nothing. They allowed the Nazis to use Jews as scapegoats: better they than us, the thinking must have been. “The Lottery” was published in 1948, shortly after the full realization of Hitler’s horrors had been revealed to the world, and these events must have been fresh in Jackson’s mind. Not surprisingly, some of the ancient scapegoating rituals alluded to in “The Lottery” began in ancient Europe according to Frazer. In fact, the primitive peoples of Europe used a god—someone who they believed had greater powers than they—as a scapegoat. In this case, it was the god of vegetation slain to insure a good crop. “The use of the divinity as a scapegoat clears up the ambiguity which, as we saw, appears to hang about the European folk-custom of ‘carrying out Death.’ Grounds have been shown for believing that in this ceremony the so-called Death was originally the spirit of vegetation, who was annually slain in spring, in order that he might come to life again with all the vigour of youth” (Frazer, Chapter 57: Public Scapegoats). This seems to be the very basis for the Jesus story in the bible and for the scapegoating in “The Lottery” since the sacrifice in the story appears to be connected with the harvest. But, perhaps Jackson’s story depicts another type of scapegoating too. While Frazer’s accounts of ritualized murder seem to place it in the realm of the heathen and not Christianity, Jackson’s story depicts the scapegoating of a group of people other than Jews. The drawing of lots in the story serves as a metaphor for the randomly applied but deeply embedded oppression of women in a patriarchal culture. Feminist criticism of the history of the United States would point to the Salem witch trials where a small group of women were accused of practicing witchcraft and affecting the lives of the people of the village. Of course, these women were killed. Another, more widespread method of scapegoating women occurred in the length of time it took for women to get the right to vote. Women were seen as not rational enough to make a coherent decision about whom to select to make laws that would affect their lives. This was a random assignation considering many of the men who could vote had already demonstrated their unworthiness. Women, on the other hand, had collectively changed the laws in the nation through protesting and demanding the Prohibition laws even before they had the right to vote. Their motive was to end the availability of liquor so that their husbands would support them financially and not beat them to death. Instead of conceding the right to vote to the half of the population that did not have it, many men in the era of women’s suffrage refused for various reasons, mainly political. The setting of the story becomes important because, as Gayle Whittier believes, “The Lottery” is set in New England, directly connecting it to the Salem witch trials and to the establishment of democracy in the United States which has everything to do with the right to vote. “Jackson dramatizes all these ‘heresies’ in a New England locale itself popularly associated with the beginnings of democracy and the ‘town meeting,’ but the ritual inverts the democratic ceremony of voting; individuals draw rather than enter ‘ballots;’ they do not choose, but are chosen; and election to high office is replaced by selection for death” (Whittier 354). Other elements of the story point to a feminist interpretation too. Tessie Hutchinson’s name may be an allusion to Anne Hutchinson, who was excommunicated from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because she dared to speak out, to preach, and subverts the patriarchal system in place. Tessie arrives late to the proceedings in the beginning of the story and when she is gently admonished, she talks back to the man who admonishes her. In the end, she attempts to subvert the patriarchal ritual by withholding the paper she draws. Of course, it is her husband who forces her to show it, just as patriarchal system requires of him (Whittier 361). The lottery in the short story represents the helplessness women feel in a society dominated by men. The drawing is performed by the men on behalf of themselves and their families including their wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. Even a young boy draws on behalf of his widowed mother, who one could presumably became widowed at a previous year’s lottery, and it is seen as a rite of passage to adulthood for the boy. Finally, the entire town, but especially the men, see the lottery not as something they necessarily desire such as patriarchal power over their women, but rather as a duty that, because they are men, they must perform. Whether the majority of the people agree or not, the killing of the scapegoat must be done because that is the tradition, the way it has always been done, and there is no sense in changing it now. The lottery has been going on for so long that many of the details of the ceremony have been lost, but not the ritual or its seeming importance. One of the “relics” of the dated tradition is the black box. The black box has been around for longer than even the oldest person in the village can remember. It is built from relics of its predecessor—the cultural practices that led to the long oppression of a randomly selected scapegoat. The people of the village wish to cling to the familiar box and the ritual of sacrifice they have come to be accustomed to even though they can see its obvious flaws. There is talk of updating the box, but no one does because they are all comfortable with the one they have even though as time passes it looks worse and worse. In “The Lottery,” the only one to demand change is the scapegoat. “Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. ‘It isn't fair,’ she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. . . .’It isn't fair, it isn't right, Mrs. Hutchinson screamed and then they were upon her” (Jackson). For so long, women were the only ones to point out the injustices in the law and society that kept them oppressed, just like Tessie Hutchinson is the only one to protest her murder because the other townspeople see it as something that may benefit them. Or, they believe like the townspeople of Salem, Massachusetts, and the people who kept silent during the Holocaust, who did not speak up to defend their friends and neighbors being unjustly scapegoated for fear of their own lives. Jackson’s short story can be interpreted in many ways: written right after World War II, after a time when women who had gone to work and controlled their own lives while the men were overseas fighting, were scapegoated and pressured to stay home and let the men be breadwinners; the story also brings to mind the scapegoating of other groups of people like the women scapegoated in the Salem witch trials and the Jews scapegoated by the world during the Holocaust. Jackson, it seems, based her story on the ancient beliefs about sacrificing a scapegoat before harvest, but Jackson’s scapegoat served as more than an offering to the powers that be in hopes that a good crop would result. It served as a reminder of the horrors that clinging to irrational tradition can create. Works Cited Cervo, Nathan. "Jackson's The Lottery." Explicator Spring 1992: Academic Search Premier. Accessed November 22, 2011. Frazer, Sir James George. "Chapter 56: The Public Expulsion of Evils." Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, Bartleby.com, 1922, 2000. http://www.bartleby.com/196/136.html. Frazer, Sir James George. "Chapter 57: Public Scapegoats." Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, Bartleby.com, 1922, 2000. http://www.bartleby.com/196/139.html. Frazer, Sir James George. "Chapter 58: Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity." Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, Bartleby.com, 1922,2000. http://www.bartleby.com/196/144.html. Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." 2004. Americanliterature.com. 22 November 2011 . Whittier, Gayle. ""The Lottery" as Misogynist Parable." Women's Studies January 1991: 353- 366. Academic Search Premier. Accessed November 22, 2011. Read More