pegkerr | The Lottery

I saw the short movie and was about 15. I identified with the woman who was selected so much I felt really oppressed for days afterward.

Yes, I definitely remember the first time I read it. It did make an impression. I can see it as a capitalist critique, I suppose, though I was raised in a "money comes last" household, so to me, that was just the way things are.

It definitely had an effect on me, as I was only about 11 when I read it and saw the short film, at school. I felt it was completely barbaric and irrational but didn't really understand Jackson's antecedents at the time (so I'm not sure it makes sense to expose young kids to it without giving them a context). Just a few years later, when I saw Harvest Home (the miniseries based on Thomas Tryon's book, which I read afterward) I saw the connection. However, I still didn't think that the unnaturally prolonged life of such superstitious behavior had a place in a modern world where we're supposed to be better about cause-and-effect than this (although many people are pretty rotten at working out cause-and-effect).

Now I actually think that Jackson's story is more of an indictment of the perpetuation of ritual/tradition for its own sake and a condemnation of much preserve-the-status-quo-at-all-costs behavior found in old-school, conservative organized religion rather than a capitalist critique. (Although one could probably find some overlap in a support of capitalism and a determination to preserve the status quo.) It's definitely anti-orthodoxy, so that in itself could come off as anti-capitalist if that's the orthodoxy of your culture. In the former Soviet Union during the Cold War it might have come off as anti-communist.

The critique seems well-researched, but I don't think it holds up to the text. If there is any division in the village, it is not an economic one, it is a sexual one. The patriarchy of the village structure is very apparant in the organization of the lottery. The only woman allowed to take an active role is Mrs. Dunbar, who is drawing only in proxy for her wounded husband. Only when the patriarchal initial division of the lottery is completed, do women even get the illusion of deciding their own fate. One thing the critique pegs correctly, I think, is that Tessie Hutchinson is emblematic of what the lottery is trying to suppress. It seems clear, however, that the lottery is meant to represent society's repression of women. The critique calls out the many rebellious acts of Tessie, many of which are seemingly done unconsciously. The lottery, then, by selecting this social malcontent, shows how the group acts to suppress those individualistic elements within it that threaten the status quo.

Jackson could have made the chosen character a rebellious teen boy, a bratty child, an obstinant head of a household. She chose, however, to represent the oppressed member of this society as an outspoken woman. I do not think she made this choice idly. If this were a capitalistic critique, I think her selection of the victim would have been more clear in that regard.

I remember reading "The Lottery" in 7th grade, which would have made me 12 or 13. It did have an impact on me, but mostly in that I thought it was a great example of the short story form. It accomplishes more in a few words, with characters and setting that are nearly non-existant they are so sparse, than many full-length novels do. That economy of form is what resonated most with me.

I read it when I was a freshman in high school, and it was exactly the wrong timing for the same reason as it was probably exactly the right timing for some people: I was up to my ears with melodrama and the idea of being persecuted, that "they would kill me if they could!" I was surrounded by it, and it didn't ring any more true to me in "The Lottery" than it did in the angsty teens around me. This impression was not alleviated when they did it as a school play and one of my friends was encouraged to shriek her lungs out, not that it took much encouragement.

It was more MESSAGE than worldbuilding, and that didn't work well for me. The fact that it had been written as a sort of anytown made me evaluate it on the notion of whether it really could happen here, because I felt I was being pushed to have that impression.

I can't be sure how old I was when I first read "The Lottery"; I'm wanting to say about the fourth grade, in a Great Books reading program. But whatever my age was, the story has held a chill over me ever since.

I always interpreted it, similar to one of your other commenters, as an indictment of what people would do to follow tradition just because it was There.

In a college creative writing class I wrote a 'response' or retelling from Tessie's perspective, but sadly I have no idea where it is. I wish I knew.

I read it as a twelve year old and thought it plain stupid. But it did resonate a little anyway because of the lingering horror of memory of kids lining up for polio shots when I was five years old, getting them one after the other (three shots) the nurses working so fast to get through my enormous grammar school that some of the kids bled--but they got right back into line. (I ran away and hid. It took them hours to find me.)

It, as did many others, sufficed to drive that sense of us against them I already had; when I read it later, I had the same reaction I do to similiar stories (like Le Guin's "Those who walk away from Omelas") that I am being manipulated into feeling shock and guilt.

I'd never read it before. It seems more an indictment of tradition and mob mentality then of capitalism, or individuality. It was quite disturbing.

Taught it for years, and it never failed to bother my students. It is clear that it speaks to something in our own lives. I think all the analyses mentioned, as well as the one presented, are in some ways true of the story.

I can't recall when I first read it, except that I had already read a lot of Ray Bradbury, notably Fahrenheit 451, and therefore was already well steeped in a similar mentality. I believed it utterly. It's easy enough in almost any school, or it was when I was in them, to see how people will turn on one person, even if there is no ritual in place to encourage it.

Shirley Jackson always got to me, quite reliably. Her tone is so matter-of fact.

P.

I believe I was a junior in highschool, although I'm not sure. I remember being oddly satisfied with the story, because soemthing about it was *true* for me; it spoke, in my mind, to the way people can coldly, premeditatively (if that's a word) and without apology do unspeakable things. How often, I wondered, do we participate in something violent like that without even realizing anything except 'thank god it's not me'?

I also remember being powerfully moved by "The Ones WHo Walk Away From Omelas," for similar reasons. what and who do we sacrifice for our own benefit and comfort? Can that ever be worth the price?

I think about these things a lot. Sometimes it worries me, how much I think about it. The pessimist in me sees stories like these as revealing something terrible that is essential and engrained in the human expereince.

An undeniably interesting and thought-provoking critique. I don't think there is one I've read yet that hasn't made me say, "Hmmm....yeah. Makes sense."

The Lottery

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Hmmmm