The Lottery

[pegkerr]

This essay here caught my eye, considering Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" as a capitalist critique. I find it kinda convincing, myself.

Discuss.

Do you remember the first time you read "The Lottery"? Did it have much of an impact on you?

Comments

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

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.