There are two related myths about history. One concerns the evolution of time, the idea that time is constantly unfolding in advance of some final incarnation, like utopia. The other is that man, who exists in time, is constantly outpacing the primal aggressions and irrational impulses of his prehistoric and uncivilized origins.
Shirley Jackson's haunting tale, "The Lottery," deconstructs these myths, though without the hopeless pessimism we might expect from such a deconstruction.
The story is set in a small, nondescript village during an annual "lottery." Neighboring villages, we learn, have a similar tradition, but some have been doing away with it. While the townsfolk gather in the square to take part in this ritual, a group of boys is piling up stones, as though in preparation for a game of war. The village official who organizes the lottery produces a black wooden box filled with slips of paper, from which every adult male will take several pieces and distribute them to the members of his family. An old man, under whose steely gaze this ceremony has been watched and conducted for generations, remarks that the lottery has always yielded a good crop, a hint of the superstitions underpinning the ceremony. Finally when the slips of paper have been meted out, the townsfolk will open their pursed hands and look inside. On one of these scraps is marked a black circle, betokening an act of brutality and inhumanity that belies the quaintness of this seemingly well-ordered village.
When "The Lottery" was published in 1948, it aroused a violent public reaction. Jackson received hate mail and harsh criticism, readers cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the story was featured (The New Yorker), and in the following years, discussion groups were formed to better understand this bizarre story. In a sharp turn of critical awareness, "The Lottery" has since been integrated into school reading programs, having become an educational rite of passage for many young students.
Though one may not be able to imagine the shock produced by "The Lottery" when it first appeared, who can doubt it? Sneaking into public circulation amidst the growing anxiety of a "cold war," Shirley Jackson's haunting parable was not only a blow to American confidence in its own noble character and mission, but was inimical to the perception of man as innately good and capable of civilization. Earlier in the century, the Anglo-Polish writer, Joseph Conrad, challenged this myth in novels which evoked the barbarism latent in purportedly civilized Western society. The "Lottery" was, by analogy, America's own "Heart of Darkness," and caused its own reverberations.
In one sense, "The Lottery" overturns the hackneyed notion of the innocent and gentle countryside, the pastoral idyll as envisioned by Virgil and many Renaissance poets. But that assessment limits the story and its author's intentions too strictly. Jackson was writing an allegory of the human soul, and she was drawing on the wide span of human history to show that something was deeply wrong, particularly in the light of two devastating world wars. As the story suggests, there is a deep reservoir of irrational impulsivity in human society, a notion that had been gaining currency since the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced in particular by Sigmund Freud, who discovered an underworld of strange and largely unconscious menace lurking beneath genteel Viennese society.
For Jackson, as for Freud, that menace is an atavism of man's primal heritage. History and human enlightenment have failed to eradicate it. We must live with our innate barbarism and suppress it with layers of civilization (albeit to our discontent, as Freud theorized). Yet, like Freud, Jackson seemed to believe that this irrationality could be controlled. While the "lottery" symbolizes the antiquated traditions, rituals, and superstitions that man preserves against his better reason, it fails to hold man in perpetual sway, as seen in its repudiation by other villages. Thus as an allegory of the human soul, "The Lottery" also reflects, if meekly, an optimism about man's inclinations toward freedom and happiness.
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