A STUDY IN INHUMANITY: “THE LOTTERY”
by Stewart Berg
A shearing away of the uncertainty surrounding Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery.”
“The Lottery” is a 1948 short story by Shirley Jackson. Despite being an idea that Orwell himself would have killed for, the story seems destined for the oblivion that comes for so many, which is a shame because the work is a rather perfect representation of the major change that took place in modern America. Indeed, so well did Jackson do that experts have spent much ink trying to obfuscate the obvious, delving into such silliness as character naming in order to avoid addressing that which the short story makes very clear. A further method of theirs is to convince young minds to leave off worthwhile reading altogether, and this latter tactic has worked rather well for them.
Jackson’s story concerns a society wherein the people impose upon themselves a yearly lottery in which the winner is stoned to death. One such stoning, from the start of the ritual to the end, is portrayed, and the story is rather short as well as readily available online.
Regarding the message behind “The Lottery,” which has been so much argued, Jackson herself went so far as to explicitly state the meaning in the month following the story’s initial publication. In July 1948, she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:
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.
The italics added are my own, and their intention is to draw attention to the issue’s answer, which stares from us out of the author’s own words. As evidenced by herself, Jackson wrote “The Lottery” in order to bring Americans into an awareness of their own “general inhumanity.” Jackson, in short, wrote her story to show how a new way of explaining the world, divorced from all before it, was in the midst of its American takeover.
As the first piece of textual evidence for this proof, one should note the entire absence of Christianity in the story. Indeed, it is rather noticeable that this depiction of a small American town features none of the religion, and the only nod that “The Lottery” seems to make to Christianity is that of a possible parallel between the woman’s death by stoning that ends the story and the Gospel story of Jesus saving a woman from a similar fate. In other words, Christianity’s sole involvement is in a form counter to the religion’s basic principles, and this inclusion is meant to serve as proof that the characters of the story possess an utter lack of biblical knowledge.
Now that is has been established that “The Lottery” concerns a Christianity-free society, we are in a position to better understand the “inhumanity” that Jackson was attempting to address. By being free of Christianity, the people of the society are, of course, also free from Christianity’s sense of good and evil, and thus, they are a people who were forced to come up with something to fill this gap. After all, the experience of the world well shows that any society must have some way of knowing both its goodness and the badness of others, and if the means to this end is suddenly removed, it will be replaced by whatever happens to come along, even the arbitrary.
In “The Lottery,” this societal need is filled by the lottery, a system in which good and bad is determined by chance. By way of drawing lots, the society identifies a scapegoat from amongst itself to be stoned to death, thereby heaping upon this single individual a very evident determination of badness. Moreover, everyone else in the society, by way of not winning the lottery, is given a very evident determination of goodness. In the absence of God, Chance has taken on the role, and it is a rather stone-hearted and -handed, deity.
As repugnant as the morality system of “The Lottery” may seem at first glance, the quality of Jackson’s work is in her sympathetic portrayal of this “inhuman” society, for she does not fall into the foolish simplicity of equating inhumanity with monstrosity. The people of “The Lottery” are inhumans, not monsters, and it is worthwhile to remember that an absence of humanity is not itself atrocity. To be “inhuman,” in this case, merely means to be outside of or opposed to the Western conception of man and woman, and it is no more itself an indictment than was the term barbarian in the time of the Greeks. “General inhumanity,” after all, is how Jackson herself worded it, and the modifier is an apt one.
After all, the people we see in the story, though each lacking what we would consider to be a moral compass, are very obviously ethical; in fact, they go so far as to, without hesitation, stone to death any of their number who happens to be determined bad by their standard. They are, however, as demonstrated above, certainly both non-Christian and non-Western, which is why their system may seem so shocking to a “general human,” but it is a system, nonetheless. Indeed, were a citizen of “The Lottery” to view a Christian-based society, he would almost certainly regard his own as preferable; for Christian morality takes much time and requires much of the population to view themselves as sinners while, on the other hand, the morality of a lottery requires no input from its participants, and every year, every person, except for a single one, is able to confidently view himself in a positive light. The matter is, one could say, that of perspective.
Now that the meaning of “The Lottery” has been made clear, we can end with the consideration of how well it served as a window into the world in which it was written. The America of the time, as is now rather clear, was transforming from a “general human” society to a “general inhuman” one, taking the lead from Europe in cleansing itself of attachment to its Christian-based past and, thereby, casting itself onto shaky terrain and virgin waters. Let it be remembered that 1948, the year Jackson published her story, was the same year in which Orwell completed 1984.
Jackson, like Orwell, saw this great change in her world, and the quality of her work, like Orwell’s, is found in her simple portrayal of the change’s extreme end—where, in other words, it might go. This, of course, also, like with Orwell, explains the discomfort that has often been aroused by Jackson’s words, but it also, like with Orwell, exemplifies a law of life that is best summarized: Life does, indeed, imitate art, but only to the point of imitation. In other words, an actual result will never exactly reflect an accurate prediction due to the fact of the prediction, which, once publicly made, becomes itself impossible. For example, any society familiar with 1984 can only, no matter what other factors and forces, approach 1984 due to the fact of 1984.
In the end, by virtue of this law, an American society similar to “The Lottery” was bound to happen, and the primary question was the form to which it would shape. It is for this reason that, today, we may not live in the precise society shown to us by Jackson, but we live in one rather like it.
Mr. Berg grew up split between rural Texas and a Seattle suburb. After graduating from Pacific Lutheran University in 2014, he moved to Austin, where he began publishing his Miscellanea series of eBooks before joining the Press. He lives in Marble Falls, Texas.