Shirley Jacksons The Lottery: How Life Affects Literature - Essay Example

This essay will argue that Shirley Jackson's life affected how she organized and presented "The Lottery" and that this merging of her life and the final work produced the underlying power which has made the story a prolonged classic in American literature. As an initial matter, in order to understand how the author's life affected the short story, it is necessary to examine Shirley Jackson in some respects. Generally speaking, she was a privileged and well-educated woman. Jackson was born in a cosmopolitan city, San Francisco, and later relocated to Bennington, Vermont.

There is no doubt that "The Lottery" was based upon Jackson's experiences and observations in Bennington (Oppenheimer, 1988: 34). In addition, Jackson was also well-educated. She earned a degree at Syracuse University. Finally, she married an educated man, Stanley Edgar Hyman, whom was a noted literary critic and humanist. Though a woman existing at a time when women's rights were not yet developed, Shirley Jackson led a comfortable life with intellectual companionship and the experience to compare different types of lifestyles.

For purposes of this essay, it is important to note that Jackson was well-educated, well-married, and that she was well-traveled enough in order to compare cosmopolitan America with small-town America. Her background was highly relevant to her writing of The Lottery.1.2 The LotteryThe Lottery was published by a leading literary magazine, the New Yorker, in 1948. The reader response was extraordinarily negative; indeed, in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle defending her work, Shirley Jackson wrote "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult.

I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives" (Letter, 1948: np). Subscriptions to the New Yorker were cancelled, hate mail was directed to Shirley Jackson, critics panned her work as hostile to American values and literary standards, and the story was even banned in South Africa. Though the story incorporated many themes, such as scapegoating and the practice of outdated traditions with no useful purpose, the story was mainly attacked because it was seen as an attack on the ignorance of small American communities.

Some argued that the story was slanderous. Jackson had simply used an old community tradition, the holding of a lottery, in order to demonstrate the imperfection of people and communities. By having the lottery winner sentenced to a public stoning, Jackson was commenting on the destructiveness of people and communities, on the ways in which decisions can become prisoners to traditions with no modern purpose, and the larger need to think about our actions and the consequences. Today, the story is deemed a classic, well-treated by critics and lay persons alike, and considered prescient for its time.

It is considered prescient because Shirley Jackson was keen enough to incorporate personal observations into the story, talented enough to craft a story that started so cheerfully and ended so tragically, and courageous enough to submit the story for publication.1.3 How Life Affects LiteratureThere are, to