The Lottery
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
That was in my head forever. Over the last couple of years, I have read much more of her work, including the magnificent (don’t miss it) We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Good piece in TNR about Shirley Jackson, in honor of her birthday. The essay opens with a description of how Shirley Jackson came home one day from walking the baby in the stroller, sat down, and wrote The Lottery in one sitting. (I believe it. There is not one bit of fat on that story, and it reads like it came out “whole”.)
She put away her groceries, put the baby in a playpen, and in a single sitting wrote the story, which describes, without elaboration or allegory, a village ritual in which the inhabitants gather annually to stone one of their neighbors. Her agent did not like it, but sold it to The New Yorker nonetheless. Soon after it was published, letters began to pour into the post office in the rural Vermont town where she was then living—more than three hundred of them, the most The New Yorker had ever seen for a work of fiction. Some of the letter-writers informed her that they were cancelling their subscriptions. Others wrote to express their puzzlement or to demand an explanation. But many, assuming that the story was based on fact, wanted to know where lotteries like the one Jackson described were held. “Are you describing a current custom?” asked a reader from Pennsylvania. “I have read of some queer cults in my time,” wrote a reader from Los Angeles, “but this one bothers me.”
What a great article! The “writer/housewife” exchange kills me — as if the clerk couldn’t even conceive of it. Wri-ter.
Like you, I read the story in high school and when I got to that last line, I remember going, “Wait. What??” I reread that ending several times, wanting it to mean something else. It’s a bit like my reaction to the end of Villette. Although that was a much more emotional reaction from me, it was still one of those “Wait. What???” endings that required several re-reads because your brain simply can’t take in what’s being said. Today, the mere mention of “The Lottery” chills me to the bone. I’d never wanted to read more of her because that story freaked me out so badly when I read it years ago, but now I’m feeling a bit curious.
I never knew what Shirley Jackson looked like until clicking on that article. It may sound silly and shallow but I love to see what authors look like only after I’ve read them — if I can help it — because I like to see if I think they “look” like their work. That kind of sounds insane, I know, but it’s just a little mental game I like to play. I have to say she doesn’t look like what I’d expect her to look like — although, admittedly, I’m basing that solely on reading “The Lottery” a million years ago. She looks like a mild-mannered lady from the secretarial pool, not a woman who writes sinister tales of stoning. But I LOVE that that’s what she looks like. It’s like her Clark Kent persona.
Okay. I now sound patently insane.
I have to go read the article, but I just wanted to note with an indignation undulled by twenty years, that the teacher who gave us that story to read during her class in high school, stopped us midway through to say, “You know they kill her in the end, right?”
No, we didn’t. What the f is your problem, lady? You probably don’t have any friends.
Tracey – I agree. Her sweet face makes what her imagination came up with that much more powerful. She died real young. So many of her short stories are about the horrors of domesticity – her collected short stories are phenomenal – but her non-fiction stuff on parenting is really great too. Funny and realistic.
But We Have Lived in the Castle. WOW.
Roo – are you serious???
LOVED The Haunting of Hill House – truly a horror story. We did the play when I was a sophomore in high school…guess who played Eleanor. Way too close to home for me as far as her character – I freaked my drama teacher out. Also took a drama trip to Galveston that year (for an Thespian Convention I think) and decided Ashton Villa was a lot like the house Jackson wrote about. There’s a lot of spookiness to Galveston anyway, so it just added to the flavor.
roo — //What the f is your problem, lady? You probably don’t have any friends.//
Hahahahahahahaha.
hahahahaha yeah, really. Someone that clueless can’t have any friends.
What on earth could be her reasoning? Fear that her students would have a nervous breakdown if they didn’t know the ending?? Well, YES, they WILL have a nervous breakdown – as I did – but I recovered and remembered the story almost word for word for decades. That’s, uhm, the point.
Yes! The surprise IS THE POINT. We’re supposed to be shocked by what happens. And we were all young enough and inexperienced enough readers that we really hadn’t heard of this famous, classic story before, and had a legit chance to experience the full force of it.
AAAHHHHhhhhh!
Maybe she had a really bad experience at a surprise party when she was young.
So enraging. It would be like telling a kid who had just discovered Star Wars, “Hey, kiddo, a heads up. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. So be prepared.”
Thanks for reminding me of Jackson and her great stories and also for talking up “Castle,” which I don’t know but plan to seek out now. Several years ago I went back and caught up on a lot of her stories again. I think “The Lottery” is probably the best of them, but I love the edgy casual way that so many of them can be so cruel. It’s so perfect for those times, and works still. It’s the kind of thing that also drew me to a lot of the stories in those old Alfred Hitchcock- or Rod Serling-branded anthologies. “An Invitation to the Hunt” by George Hitchcock I particularly remember just about did me in. It can be found in the Alfred Hitchcock anthology Stories My Mother Never Told Me, along with Jackson’s “The Summer People” and a bunch of other good ones.
There’s a movie of “The Lottery,” right? Because I *swear* we watched it in junior high English.
(Today she’d be vilified by other mommy bloggers for writing while her baby played. A PLAYPEN, WTF? DON’T YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO INTERACT WITH CHILDREN? WHY DID YOU EVEN *HAVE* KIDS IF YOU’RE GOING TO IGNORE THEM?)
I’m so glad I’m not a mommy blogger. Those chicks are vicious.
OMG THERE IS. It’s on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIm93Xuij7k
Ooh – I’ve never seen it!
I am pretty sure that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was at least turned into a play – it is totally cinematic, made for the movies.
It reminded me a lot of The Others – had that same sense of wordless menace.
Darth Vader is Luke’s father?? Oh, bother.
sorry! SPOILER ALERT
Roo–That reminds me of a professor I had for a Tolkien class in college (long story, don’t ask)…This is back in the early eighties when not nearly as many people had been made familiar with the story of Lord of the Rings by watching the movies. Halfway through the semester, the prof was clearly on the verge of giving away the ending so he could make some point or other and the half of the class that hadn’t read the books before cried out and stopped him. He got a kind of huffy look but then moved on…Then about two weeks later–with no warning at all (hence no chance for anyone to stop him again!)–he blurted out the ending (which I’m not giving away here!) and just stood there glaring at us….One kid got up straightaway and left the class for good–I heard later that he brought a complaint to the head of the English department and got his tuition for the class refunded. Small compensation for wasting several months of your life AND losing the chance to experience the ending on his own…and no, that professor didn’t have any friends either!
Probably every English department in the world has one of those–I was just glad mine was in a rare class where I actually had already read the book in question!
That is crazy.
Although at least he’s cutting to the end of a long, intricate trilogy– not a beautifully spare short story we could have finished reading in a single class.
This sort of thing is why I almost never read reviews of something before I see it or read it. I like surprises. I don’t want to be prepared for my art experiences.
Yes, The Lottery is, what, 10 pages long? It takes you 15 minutes to read. She couldn’t wait for you guys to finish?? That’s the creepy thing about that story – how casual and everyday the opening is … and yet how Jackson somehow manages to create a sense of impending doom.
I had the same “Wait, what?” reaction Tracey did in high school! Also, weirdly enough, the majority of my book club voted to read “The Haunting of Hill House” for October. . . and except for one person nobody (at least among the few who showed up and admitted it) got through it, myself included. She’s not my cup of tea at all, but I find I can’t help but respect her unusual and rather striking take on life and personalities.
Curious why she isn’t your cup of tea. What is it about her writing you don’t like?
My first experience of The Lottery was on the New Yorker fiction podcast where they get authors to chose a story from the NY archives and read it aloud. I think it was possibly Joyce Carol Oats who chose The Lottery, but whoever it was, I made the mistake of listening to it while walking home from work at 1am. Baaaad idea. Love her!
Scary!!