The Lottery

“The Lottery,” a short story by Shirley Jackson published in 1948, caused a sensation with its tale of a pleasant American town where, each summer, one citizen is chosen by random lottery and stoned to death. The story presents an extreme case of conventional thinking and mindless group action untethered by reason or compassion. When it published the story, The New Yorker magazine received a firestorm of criticism, hate mail, and cancelled subscriptions. Today, however, “The Lottery” is widely considered a classic of horror fiction.

Though her career was cut short at age 48, author Shirley Jackson was prolific, writing hundreds of short stories and several novels, most of them in the mystery and horror genres. Her most famous creations are the controversial short story The Lottery and the gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House); both are regarded as superlative examples of horror fiction, and both have been adapted for stage and screen.

High-strung and lonely as a girl—she wrote “i thought i was insane”—Jackson early on penned stories while putting up with her mother’s relentless criticisms about her lack of good looks and refusal to behave in a feminine manner. Jackson married her college sweetheart, Stanley Hyman, a scholar of literary criticism who encouraged her writing but was unfaithful and treated her as his inferior. They both worked for a time at The New Yorker, then moved to North Bennington, Vermont, where Professor Hyman taught at Bennington College while Jackson raised the kids, did the housework, suffered rejection by the locals, and scraped together time to write. Her published works supported the family finances, but she received only a small allowance from Hyman.

Jackson’s fears of betrayal by close relatives, and her dislike of small-town pettiness, figure prominently in the plots of her stories. She published story collections, gave lectures, dabbled in witchcraft, made fun of the locals, and wrestled with loneliness. Chronic anxiety, combined with overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, and medicines, contributed to a premature decline in her health; she died in 1965. Jackson is highly regarded today by aficionados of horror and suspense literature. Some see her as a feminist whose writings addressed stultifying family-life issues faced by women in the mid-20th century. Notably, in “The Lottery,” the town selects a woman for slaughter and ignores her protests.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a family that, by long tradition, always cut the ends from a ham before roasting it. Asked why, they reply, “We’ve always done it that way” and “It lets the juices get absorbed better.” One relative, puzzled, seeks out a great-grandmother and asks her for the reason; the elderly lady says, “Oh, we did that because our cooking pan wasn’t big enough for the whole ham.” The point? Sometimes people follow traditions heedlessly. Sometimes following tradition is of little moral consequence, but other times it leads to tragedy. Shirley Jackson’s shocking horror story, “The Lottery,” serves as a pointed object lesson about conformity and mob behavior.

The small-town setting of “The Lottery” may have been inspired by Jackson’s own life. After working together at The New Yorker, Jackson and her college-sweetheart husband, Stanley Hyman, moved to North Bennington, Vermont. Stanley taught at Bennington College while Jackson wrote stories and suffered indignities as a faculty wife who was too iconoclastic for the townsfolk. The conformity and small mindedness represented in “The Lottery” may reflect Jackson’s attitude to her own surroundings.  

The idea that a village of old-fashioned American farm families would countenance the brutal tradition of “The Lottery” and repeat it year after year without question seemed utterly unbelievable to early readers. “The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you,” remarked the author (Heller, Zoë. “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson.” The New Yorker, 23 Oct. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson). Many subscribers to The New Yorker were offended and cancelled their subscriptions. Some of the letters the author received asked for the location of these lotteries so the letter writers could go there and watch. Jackson had touched on something dark within the human soul, something that generated a wide range of disturbing responses to her story. In a way, these responses merely confirmed the author’s hunch about people’s potential for depravity.

Human sacrifice is a tradition going back into prehistory, and executions were a form of public entertainment in Europe and America for centuries. Today, in places where capital punishment is still practiced, public officials and victims are often are invited to witness the killing. Jackson’s story isn’t simply about ritual murder. Destructive group-think can take other forms. To take one example, within a few years of the publication of The Lottery, fears in the US about the rise of Communism devolved into a frenzied witch hunt in which American citizens accused each another of Communist sympathies while bystanders kept quiet for fear of being accused themselves.

Jackson suggests that violence doesn’t happen spontaneously. It’s a social practice, a deeply entrenched American tradition taught to the next generation. One of the darkest moments in the story is when someone gives little Davy Hutchinson a handful of rocks that he is supposed to throw at his own mother, Tessie, who has been chosen for sacrifice. The town trains its children almost from infancy to obey blindly the dictates of the lottery.

The author’s chief point isn’t, however, that humans have a tendency toward violence as individuals. It’s that, in group settings, people are casually capable of heinous acts that they’d never commit as individuals. “The Lottery” stands as a testament to the creepy and frightening possibility that perfectly nice people around us are capable, in a group, of great savagery. And perhaps we are, too.