45 pages • 1 hour read
Shirley JacksonThe Lottery
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Small Towns and Small Minds
Small towns can be friendly; they also can be closed-minded and cruel. The Lottery shows how both traits can exist in the same people at the same time. The story begins on a warm, sunny day as the community gathers for an annual ritual. Townsfolk chat among themselves in a manner that suggests long acquaintance and friendly fellowship. The lottery, however, is a different matter. These nice people will conclude the event by stoning to death one of their own.
The purpose of the lottery is ostensibly to ensure a good harvest. That this is irrational is clear, yet the people continue to practice the ritual. Nearby towns have abandoned the lottery, but this town persists doggedly onward, performing the rite despite occasional murmurs of doubt. They know the lottery is a relic of the past, but they won’t abandon it.
This clearly is a form of group madness, yet the villagers carry out the rite’s brutal demands by stoning Tessie Hutchinson. As the victim, she is the only one to protest. Not even her own family, including her youngest son Davy, shrink from participating in her execution. The story suggests that people can be more concerned with convention than with its consequences; that rationality is trumped by group-think; and that normal-seeming people can behave heinously in a crowd.
The Scapegoat
Throughout history, people have blamed festering problems within their communities on one or more individuals, exiling or executing these suspects, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence. One notable example from United States history is the Salem Witch Trials of the early 1690s—during which 200 citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, most of them women, were accused of witchcraft and 20 were executed. Some historians suggest that the trials were a way to resolve the quarrels of a deeply religious community riven by discord. In other words, witchcraft wasn’t the real issue: those condemned by the trials were scapegoats for other problems in the community.
In “The Lottery,” one person is chosen at random every year for ritual slaughter, presumably to ensure a bountiful harvest. These chosen effectively serve as sacrificial scapegoats. Old Man Warner says, “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (297). His comment suggests that most townsfolk have long forgotten the reason why the ritual began, and that it now persists merely as a superstition—a generalized fear that, if the ritual isn’t performed, some unknown calamity will visit the town. Better to sacrifice someone—anyone—than to risk that.
The Cruelty of Friends and Family
A recurring theme in Shirley Jackson’s stories is the betrayal of hearth and home. Troubled by a cruel mother, an oppressive husband, and a charming small town that rejected her, the author wrote obsessively about old houses that victimize their inhabitants, spouses who murder their partners, and decent people who, in close quarters, slowly lose their minds (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).
The Lottery highlights these concerns with its allegory of an annual ritual wherein the town’s residents select randomly one of their members for execution. Early in the text, it’s made clear that the locals know and like each other. Their children play; the men talk shop; the women “greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip” (292); they laugh at humorous comments. All seems well in the community, its members clearly on good terms and in good cheer. Yet shortly they will, just as casually, slaughter neighbor Tessie Hutchinson, someone liked by everyone.
The town’s lottery brings to life the gnawing fear, usually pushed aside, that friends and family might suddenly and without mercy stab us in the back. It seems offensive even to suggest such a thing; many readers declared as much when the story first came out. Yet the idea can’t easily be dismissed; it grows into a doubt that crawls under our skin and raises an itch of creeping dread.
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