When Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" first appeared in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, she was fairly flooded with responses, with most readers completely horrified and confused about what her intention in writing this story could have possibly been. Many readers wanted to know if this story was based on an actual town and actual sacrifice, and if so, where this setting was located. Most readers did not react kindly to Jackson's story, yet it has become one of the most studied plots in literature courses.
Jackson herself eventually made some comments regarding her purpose behind the story to various people over a long span of years. Perhaps one of the most significant is this comment she made to the editor of 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.
Writing this story around the same time that Hitler was leading a push for the annihilation of the Jewish population, Jackson perhaps hoped to illuminate the violence of genocide—and through her falsely idyllic setting, perhaps she hoped to make readers examine the way they complacently followed "general inhumanity" every day.
After all, no one disagrees with the terms of the lottery until it gets personal. Perhaps this is the problem: as long as violence happens to other people, many people simply don't give the issue any thought.
Ordinary people who are capable of great evil is a scary yet very real possibility as proven time after time in history, and perhaps this idea is what really scared Jackson's readers the most.
Further Reading
One reason Jackson could have written this story is to draw attention to the way we often hang on to outdated traditions that no longer really make any sense or have value. The narrator tells us that in the community depicted in the story, "no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box" used during the lottery ceremony. Although the black box is old, so old that it predates the oldest member of the community and is "splintered badly" and growing "shabbier" by the year, no one wants to do away with it in favor of something newer and less shabby. The box has no value in and of itself: it isn't even the original box. And yet, there is a strange, communal attachment to it.
If members of this community are so loathe to do away with a shabby wooden box, imagine how tightly they must cling to other traditions that seem more significant. Despite the fact that the lottery is cruel—these people ought to know that human sacrifices do nothing to help the harvest (after all, such an idea was the domain of certain ancient societies, but not modern ones)—they hold onto it. They are so resistant to change, so unthinking, that they retain...
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a murderous traditiononly because it is tradition, not because it has actual value for their community. The fact that the lottery is a tradition doesn't make it less cruel, but this group of people seems to wash their hands, so to speak, of the cruelty because it is tradition. Their thoughtlessness is appalling, as is is true of anyone who maintains such an awful, cruel tradition only because it is what has always been done.
One could come up with a multitude of reasons as to why Jackson wrote the short story "The Lottery."
Given that her stories typically provided a foil to her life, Jackson seemed to be flirting with ideas she could only dream about and invent. Shirley's life was one filled with content and without conflict.
Therefore, in her flirting with the alternative, Jackson created stories which illustrated life as something which held constant neuroses, the alienated, and the exiled.
Her story, "The Lottery", depicts the old ways of a small rural farming town. The town holds a yearly lottery so as to "find" a person to sacrifice for the crops.
Here, Jackson flirts with the idea of human sacrifice for the betterment of society. There are two reasons as to why she may have constructed the story.
First, the story could simply be depicting a period in time where sacrifice was considered accepted. People simply followed the traditions of their culture simply because it had worked in the past.
Second, Jackson could be examining the fact that many times people are willing to blindly follow anything for any reason. This shows the characters to be mules-they simply do what society tells them to without question.
Why did Shirley Jackson choose a lottery as her subject matter?
Are you asking why Shirley Jackson chose to portray the traditions that she does in "The Lottery"? If so, know that Jackson herself gave different answers at different times as to its inspiration.
According to Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, Jackson cited anti-Semitism as one reason, but at another time she claimed real people were the characters' inspiration. Franklin believes that the most likely reason is a more general one offered by Jackson's correspondence with a literary critic:
“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."
In the end, it's typically impossible to pinpoint the sole inspiration that motivates an author to portray a certain situation in a certain way -- after all, even when a writer *knows* what's inspiring them, there may be countless other things influencing their authorial choices on a subconscious level. Though Jackson's intent cannot be defined absolutely, "The Lottery" is a story that allows myriad interpretations and garners diverse reader reactions.
Further Reading