Стилистические особенности рассказа "The Lottery"

Annotation

        The research deals with the interpretation of "The Lottery", a short story written by Shirley Jackson, a brilliant American author, whose name is not well known to the Russian reader. In spite of the lack of critical attention in general "The Lottery", considered to be a masterpiece by the majority of literary critics, has caused heated discussions since the day of its publications. When it was published in 1948 it produced the effect of a bomb blown up in the reader's faces and now fifty years later it still strikes a nerve.

        In our research we examined some interpretations of "The Lottery" and made an attempt to find our own explanation of the events described in the short story.

Introduction

        On a bright morning in the late spring of 1948, Shirley Jackson, the author of a novel and a number of short stories, the wife of Stanley Hyman, a university lecturer and critic, and a mother of two children, was doing her daily errands. As often on these trips, she let her thoughts wonder in various odd directions. A recent book Stanley had brought home on the ancient rites of human sacrifice had stuck in her mind. The book discussed tribal units, in which each member was willing to stand up for the others. How, she wondered, would such a rite work today, in the village?

        An hour or so later she walked back up the long hill home. The germ of a story idea had started to fester in her head. Coming back home she calmed the children, put the food away, and went right to the typewriter. Quickly, effortlessly, as if everything in her mind so far had been leading to this, she wrote the masterpiece that would be linked to her name forever, possibly the most chilling horror tale of all time: "The Lottery".

        Simply, even sparely written, without one extraneous word, one false step, "The Lottery" tells of a traditional rite held annually in a small New English village: the townspeople gather together in spring to draw lots, as their ancestors have done for generations. Finally one woman, an average housewife, ends up holding the single piece of paper with a black spot on it. Swiftly, eagerly, yet in a dignified, deliberate manner, the other members of the village descend on her and stone her to death.

        "The Lottery" came out in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, and its effect was overwhelming. It provoked an outpouring of fury, horror, rage, disgust, and intense fascination. Many readers complained about the violent and senseless story, while others praised it as a brilliant moral allegory. Because Jackson never gave away how she felt about that terrifying event, she pushed her readers to make their own judgment. And so did the critics. In different periods of time and by different critics "The Lottery" was read in many ways. Some referred it to the simple description of barbaric rituals; others thought it was about scape-goating and atrocities. Analogues have also been made to capital punishment and military draft.

        In our research we will examine the most popular interpretations of the lottery.

Past and Present of Rituals

        Let's start with the interpretation of .the lottery as an investigation on ancient rites and rituals. Some critics believed that it was her husband who inspired Shirley, that it was he who had fed her generous helpings of anthropological myth and ritual. Shirley who herself gave varying clues to her friends did not exclude such interpretation. When an old professor of hers from Syracuse H. W. Herrinyton, wrote to congratulate her, she wrote back saying that it had all originated in his folklore course.

        Those critics who share this opinion date the lottery to one of the ancient practices, that is the annual sacrifice of a scapegoat... for the benefit of the community. The "benefit" behind the lottery seems to be a ritualistic cleansing of the village from its sins. The villager chosen at random in the drawing inherits from the community all of the evils of the past year, and then is stoned to death. Although to others this practice seems barbaric, to them it is a necessary practice which must be continued from year to year. From every civilization there have been ritualistic cleansing methods similar to that in "The Lottery". The village in discussion is an agricultural village, and in such villages the life and death cycles are in constant contemplation. In some ancient societies, it was believed that the sowing and reaping of crops represented the life cycle. Because of this, cultures began human sacrifices to imitate this cycle. In order for a new fresh crop to be ready for harvest in the fall, the previous year crop must die. The rituals of human sacrifice "were usual and necessary...for a fertile crop" ^[1].

        It is notable that the administrator of this affair is named Mr. Summers, and his helper is Mr. Graves. This choice of names represents the life cycle completely: life from the summer sun and death ends up in the grave. This life cycle becomes entwined in the beliefs of the society and the practices remain and are taught, although the first connotations of the practices have been lost. Over time the villagers have not any idea about exactly why they stone a fellow member of their society, but they just know that it has to be done and that it will.

        It shows how people stick to tradition even though it may be irrational and all sense of logic may be lost. In such interpretation "The Lottery" is a tale about a ritual that is performed annually, but no one really knows why. Warner's remark about “Lottery in June, corn by heavy soon" - brings ideas of earthly fertility but it is hardly probable that anyone in the late actually believes that, thus his refusal to question the ritual or even to give it up is even more important. No one ever remembers how the lotteries started. And even though Warner keeps saying such things as "people ain't the way they used to be", he never explains or defines just how they used to be. One probable answer being that he does not remember it but knows only that he has such desires for the past since he has already survived it for seventy-seven lotteries.

        It is human nature to cling on to the past. Unfortunately clinging on to the past leaves no room for progress, even when it is necessary. Most people are afraid of the wind of changes, it makes them feel insecure.

        Another possible answer to Warner's "people ain't the way they used to be" is the probable change of the attitude of the lottery's winner. What seems ironic today, was very true when the lottery began. Back then, when people understood the ritual fully, a person would be proud of being a hero who saves the village from the angry gods so that his people would have a good harvest and eat. His family would be honored and cared for today, however, that ideal attitude is different out of ignorance. People today do not understand the ritual, and what is left is only the pitiful imitation and illusion of keeping their heritage. It is very illogical and in their pretense of being civilized and remembering their past, they are doomed to never actually become enlightened.

Lust for Blood

However this interpretation seems to-be one sided, it only touches upon one of the numerous levels of this enigmatic story. If "The Lottery" was a story about the people who forgot the significance of the ceremony but still have been held on it would not have provoked such a horror, rage, and disgust. As Elizabeth Janeway put "Miss Jackson's great gift is not to create a world of fantasy and terror, but rather to discover the existence of the grotesque in the ordinary world. She found evil in common things". In spite of all people are wild animals inside, whose nature is depraved. While they like to imagine that they have surpassed their animal instincts, their inhumanity is apparent when they will gang up on a single individual using a lie to justify their slaughter. That lie being that the death of the singled out person would be for the good of all Set in the modern day that "The Lottery" is in, such a death serves but one purpose; fulfilling the blood lust in individual. (From this point of view, an animal is actually more humane than the man. The animal kills to eat while the man murders for either dominance or sport in his heart).

But it doesn't stop there, not with stoning. With stoning, men do not even have to take the guilt for their blood lust. It is a community activity where, while there is someone executed, there is no executioner. No one is guilty and murder is accepted and celebrated.

Is human society so hypocritical, does it only pretend to be civilized? We would like to be less pessimistic but the fact that more than a few of the writers of the letters, Shirley Jackson received, wanted to know where the lotteries were being held and if they could watch them, does not leave any hope.

Let us not forget that the action of the story is set in a small American town, the setting of so many modern stories, including those by Steven King. The town which seems quiet, peaceful, nearly serene turns out to be the devil's place and its inhabitants appear to be weird monsters. No wonder there is no church or courthouse in the main square of the town and its people celebrate Halloween but not Christmas or Easter. Even the most familiar things and people are not what they seem to be.

Human community lacks love, care, mercy or Christian values. Such generalization could not but arouse a storm of indignation..

The bloody ritual mode, a masquerade for the people's selfishness and ruthlessness opens another possible interpretation. Beneath all of the trappings of civilization, people continue searching for scapegoats and thus their innate savagery shines through. "This story comments upon the all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat and to visit upon the scapegoat the cruelties that most of us seem to have damned within us"^[2]. This is clearly seen in many of the characters in "The Lottery" Mrs. Delacroix brightly greets her friend Mrs. Hutchinson and then within an hour enthusiastically encourages Mrs. Dunbar to come and stone Mrs. Hutchinson to death.

As long as it is not the individual or their family, every lottery is fair. Mrs. Hutchinson herself was a willing and enthusiastic participant when it wasn't her family faced with the stoning. And she goes in her selfishness even farther than that. She pleads to have her daughter and son-in-law in the family drawing so that her chances for survival would be better. Then her own children "beamed and laughed" when they learn that they did not have the black dot although they were old enough to understand that someone in their family was to die. They give no care whatsoever: they are safe, so they are happy and laugh.

More than that children in Jackson's story appear as metaphors for individuals free from any ethic norms imposed by society. It is a chilling act of the story at the end when someone hands little Davy, the younger son of Tessie Hutchinson, pebbles to stone his mother. However, that is not the most shocking part. The shocking part is his silence. He doesn't protest hurting his mother at all. There is seemingly no love in this town, not even that of mother and child. If Davy is an average child, then all the children in the town learn to turn their backs on everyone else except themselves. When people are used to being selfish, it is nearly impossible to better a community.

Atrocities of totalitarian regimes

        So we have examined the two most popular critical attitudes: first that it describes unexamined and unchanged traditions which could be easily changed if only people realized their implications, second that it is about man's ineradicable primitive aggressively.

        Peter Kosenko, a modern American critic, offers an absolutely different approach to Shirley Jackson's work. He interprets "The Lottery" in terms of Marxist ideology. In his opinion the lottery is an ideological mechanism rather than an irrational tradition. It serves to reinforce the village's social order by instilling the village with an unconscious fear, that if they resisted this order they might be selected in the next lottery. P. Kosenko believes that this social order and ideology are essentially capitalist and puts forward the following arguments to prove his assumption.

        The village in which the lottery takes place has a bank, a post office, a grocery store, a coal business, a school system; its women are housewives rather than field workers or writers; and its men talk of "tractors and taxes". So the village exhibits the same socio-economic stratification that most people take for granted in a modern, capitalist society.

        The lottery, according to P. Kosenko, suggests election rather than selection. The village's ruling class participates in order to convince others that they are not above everyone. But the lottery democratic illusion is only an ideological effect that prevents the villagers from criticizing the class structure of their society. But this is not the only function of the lottery. It also reinforces a village work ethic which distracts the villagers from the division of labor that keeps women powerless in their homes and Mr. Summers powerful in his coal company office. The lottery function then is to terrorize the village into accepting, in the name of work and democracy, the inequitable social division of labor and power on which its social order depends.

In stoning Jessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat onto which they can project their own temptation to rebel. But ultimately these rebellious impulses are channeled by the lottery and its attendant ideology away from their proper object, -capitalism and capitalists, - into anger at .the rebellious victim of capitalist social organization. In his article "A Marxist/Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" P. Kosenko uses the term "repress" which is extremely important in case of our studies. It seems to us that the community in question (the so-called closed community) represents not only a capitalist society but a totalitarian dictatorship in general, no matter what ideology, capitalist or communist, it is based on. To the Russian reader strict order fed by fear of the society members in more associated with the repressions of 1937 or GULAG than with American democracy, no matter how injust it might be. All those techniques used by the organizers of the lottery have been successfully employed by numerous totalitarian regimes.

Witch hunting be that the so-called public enemy or damned cosmopolites helped terrorize the society, keep it in fear and thus divert its attention from those who are responsible for poverty and famine.

Besides life in fear makes people submissive and obedient. Fear is the best way to make everybody vote unanimously either for or against. It makes one believe that if your neighbor is selected to be stoned (beheaded, sent to the gas chamber) you are more likely to be safe.

This returns us to the notion of scape-goating and victimization but on a different level. P. Kosenko admits that people are cruel but their cruelty is not inborn, as he puts it "the depravity of man is not innate, it is learned". Kosenko is sure that in order to facilitate her reader's grasp of this point Jackson has included at least one genuinely innocent child in the story -Davy Hutchinson. When he has to choose his lottery ticket, the adults help him while he looks at them "wonderingly". And when Jessie is finally to be stoned, "someone" has to give Dave Hutchinson a few pebbles to stone his mother. The village makes sure that Davy learns what he is supposed to do before he understands why he does it or the consequences. But this does not mean that he could not learn otherwise.

        All the above said doesn't make Shirley Jackson a conscious fighter against totalitarian regimes; it just proves that her story is so profound and that it lends itself to more than one interpretation.

        Critics close to Kosenko read "The Lottery" from the feministic point of view and the story lends itself to such an interpretation. Although the action is set in the modern day the society portrayed is completely patriarchal. Gender roles are firmly set. The women are introduced only after the men. When Mrs. Hutchinson comes running late all the men are sure to mention her to her husband before conversing with her. This is suggestive of how males might be respectful in not treading in the fellow male's domain. Even the children display their gender roles. When the boys are playing and gathering piles of stones, the girls stand out of their way and watch. Girls have to stay out of the way since their role cannot be soiled with working among an economic world^[3]. Gender roles are so clearly defined in the village that not even age makes a boy respectful to a female. "Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother"^[4].

        Even the rules of the lottery itself favor a woman who knows her place and has borne several children; in a large family, each person has less of a chance of being chosen. Thus the world of "The Lottery" is the men's world, and Tessie's rebellion (if her mild disagreement could be called so) may be interpreted as the first attempt of the village's women to do something in their defense.

        Since the story was written after World War II it might as well reflect the military draft (if your number comes up you may not be the winner) or the Holocaust. Shirley herself told one of her friends that the story was based on anti-Semitism and grew out of her encounters with one particularity prejudiced shopkeeper. Taking into account the fact that Stanley Hyman, Shirley's husband, was Jewish and she faced of anti-Semitism not once, this version may also seem convincing. In this case not an individual but the entire nation is the victim-of scape-goating and atrocities.

What is "The Lottery" about

        A columnist from the San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph Henry Jackson, sent Shirley a letter: "No one writes a story in a vacuum. Something pulled the trigger that set "The Lottery" of in your mind - what was it?"

        So what is it all about? In truth, "The Lottery" originated with Shirley, and nowhere else. It was the purest, most direct expression she would ever give to that knowledge of human evil she had carried within her since childhood.

        From an early age, Jackson did not feel completely comfortable in the society around her. She preferred to sit in her room and write poetry rather than play with the other children in her neighborhood. Alone in her room, Jackson explored the magical words, the alter-egos which her family did not understand. She did not satisfy her mother, a wealthy socialite who wanted her daughter to be beautiful and popular and was disturbed by her talk of "other worlds". Relations between Jackson and her mother were tense throughout her life, paralleling the conflict between Jackson and the society in which she found no place for herself.

        Throughout her life, Shirley Jackson struggled with a conflict between her individuality and society's requirements to adjust to its norms and standards. The fact that she was not compatible with society did not give her a harmonic life in the village she lived in since 1945. People in North Bennington/Vermont are said to having hated, avoided and feared her for her outbursts, when she sensed injustice to her children at school for instance. A legend about Jackson says, that she was hit with rocks by kids in her village which supposedly looked a lot like the incident described in "The Lottery". But it would be wrong to say that it is drawn on Shirley's personal experience.

        The tale used the trappings of anthropological myth; it used the character of the village she lived in; it used the painful awareness of anti-Semitism she had acquired over the years. Yet the raw materials were no more than layers, a series of veils for the reader to pass through on the way to the truth. And that truth was so bitter, so ugly, so hard to bear; it was no surprise readers raged, cursing her and the magazine that had printed the story.

Answering the letter of the journalist mentioned above Shirley wrote: "I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their own lives".

Her political knowledge was almost nonexistent, her world almost entirely private and personal but unlike most of her contemporary writers she was able to say it better or to see more clearly into the very heart of human evil.

Her insights and observations about man and society are disturbing "The themes themselves are not new: evil cloaked in seeming good, prejudice and hypocrisy, loneliness and frustration, psychological studies of minds that have slipped the bonds of reality. If we examine for instance, the story lines of other stories by Shirley Jackson, we'll see they do not make any exception. Jackson's themes usually come back to the evil founds in ordinary things" («The Haunting of Hill House", "The Bird's Nest", "We Have Always Lived in The Castle"). Literary critic Granville Hicks wrote about "We have always lived in the Castle": "Miss Jackson was certainly not the first writer to assert that there is evil in everybody, but what might be merely a platitude becomes a great truth because of the death and consistency of her own feeling about life. She saw the magic in the mundane, and the evil behind the ordinary."

And since evil is everywhere no one is protected from it and all of us can become its victims. A victim, an innocent victim - this may be the key word speaking about Shirley Jackson's creative work. Victims of ancient rituals, of scapegoating, of the society's oppression, of sexual inequality, war atrocities, Anti-Semitism. Innocent victims for those who suffer sometimes do not even understand what for.

Thus S. Jackson's "Lottery" is not about capitalist society's faults (sins) or eternal search of scapegoats, it is about all the above mentioned. So never ask for whom the bell tells.

Conclusion

        There are events the humankind faces from time to time that seem to change the world in the years to come. In fact they don't change anything. On August 6, 1945, an American plane released the world's first atomic bomb, high over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A few days later another was dropped on Urakami, an industrial suburb of Nagasaki. The two bombs destroyed parts of two cities and immediately killed about 150.000 Japanese. More thousands were burned or injured in other ways. Many of them died later.

        On September 11, 2001 two aircrafts destroyed the twin towers of the world Trade Centre in New York causing their collapse and deaths of 9 thousand people.

        The list of innocent victims of human cruelty contains millions of names but the humankind (We are not sure this PC word fits in) does not seem to have satisfied its lust for blood, and the number of victims on the list will continue to grow.

        What do we mean mentioning all these facts? Only that the short story written by Shirley Jackson about 60 years ago has not lost its modern ring.

Bibliography

1.  Lainhoff, Seymour. "Jackson's The Lottery."' The Explicator. Mar 1954

2.  Cervo, Nathan. "Jackson's The Lottery."' The Explicator. Spring 1992

3.  Coulthard, A.R. "Jackson's The Lottery.'" The Explicator. Spring 1990

4.  Griffin, Amy A. "Jackson's The Lottery." The Explicator. Fall 1999

5.   Kosenko, Peter.  "A Marxist/Feminist Reading of   Shirley Jackson's The Lottery."1 The New    Orleans Review.  Spring 1985

6.  Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren,  "'The Lottery': Interpretation." In Understanding Fiction. Englewood Cliffs:Prentic-Hall. 1959.