Sacred Violence in Shirley Jackson's the Lottery Ted Bailey

SACRED VIOLENCE IN SHIRLEY JACKSON’S THE LOTTERY TED BAILEY University of Miskolc Abstract: The jarring juxtapostion of a biblical stoning in a mid-20th century North American village in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has baffled readers and led critics to numerous interpretations of the short story. This paper will briefly survey the range of criticism before applying René Girard’s (1966) theory on violence, religion, and scapegoating to this tale of ritualized communal murder. Key words: René Girard, Shirley Jackson, scapegoating, violence 1. Introduction Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery (1949) is a text frequently read in American high schools and colleges, and one I myself have assigned many times to students in writing classes. Invariably, this text about a small North American community that comes together in late June every year to select one person, chosen by drawing lots in two stages, who is then ritually stoned by everyone else, provokes a strong reaction from students, much as it did upon its publication in 1948. At the time, the story sparked the largest number of responses from readers in the history of the New Yorker, the magazine that originally published it, with many outraged at the brutality it depicted and a few even requesting to know where the village was so that they could go visit it. The image of a peaceful, 20th century farming community employing the ancient, biblical-style punishment of stoning on a randomly chosen victim baffled many American readers, who were either unable to comprehend this juxtaposition or were offended by it. This short story has also elicited a number of interpretations from literary critics and what I propose to do now is outline some of the responses before moving on to analyze the short story using René Girard’s (1966) ideas on the relationship between violence and the sacred as a framework. 2. Critical interpretations Randy Bobbitt (1994:8) identified three categories into which most interpretations of The Lottery may fall: it may be understood as a story about a) the power of traditions, b) an agricultural fertility ritual, or c) the tendency to scapegoat individuals. In the first case, the emphasis is usually placed on how the tradition of holding the lottery is perpetuated. For example, Old Man Warner stands in for the voice of the older generation who proclaim that what was once must always be - “always been a lottery!” the old man says loud enough for all to hear (Jackson 1949:215). He denounces anyone who would give up the lottery as “a pack of fools” who would lead the community back to pre-historic times. Indeed, Old Man Warner seems to even derive his sense of identity from having survived so many times. The placing of stones in Little Davy’s hand so that he too has to participate can be seen as an element of perpetuating the lottery for future generations - not only are the young taught the rules of the game at an early age but now there is no way he can later back out of the tradition and claim that others had B.A.S. vol. XX, 2014 38 killed his mother, for he too had joined in. The role of ritual is also mentioned as a way for individuals to distance themselves from any personal responsibility in the killing. Old Man Warner plays the main role in discussions of the lottery as an ancient fertility rite. It is he who reminds everyone of the saying “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (215), thus suggesting that, for whatever reason people do it now, the original purpose of the lottery was a sacrifice for a good harvest. The scapegoating line of interpretation associates the stoning of a victim with the ancient Hebrew tradition of choosing a scapegoat to carry off the sins of the community at large and is often seen as a statement about man’s inhumanity to man. Brooks and Warren (1971:74), for instance, cite the story as a tale about the “all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat”, while others go back to Jackson’s own statement about the story shortly after publication that “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” (qtd. in Kosenko 1985:27). It should be noted that many of these categories overlap and, in choosing a particular critical approach, critics will often draw on elements of more than one of them. In a feminist interpretation, for example, the choice of a housewife as the scapegoat is invariably emphasized and attention is drawn to the similarity of the victim’s name, Tessie Hutchinson, with the New England Puritan rebel Anne Hutchinson, who fought against the tradition of male authority in spiritual matters. Fritz Oehlschlaeger (1988:259) sees the ritual as “a patriarchal society’s way of controlling female sexuality” and focuses on the dominant position of men both in the village life and in organizing the lottery every year, as proof that the tradition is a masculine one. He also sees a pattern of female resistance to the lottery, especially in Mrs Adams being the only one to outright question the continuation of the lottery. In a Marxist reading of the story, Peter Kosenko (1985:31) also identifies the male-dominated power structure in the village, but sees the tradition as a mechanism “to reinforce an inequitable social division of labor”. In Kosenko’s view, the choice of Tessie Hutchinson as the scapegoat is linked to her late appearance at the ceremony and her death then understood by the villagers as punishment for her failure to adhere to the community’s work ethic. The winners in all this are the village’s business elite, Mr Summers, who owns the coal company, and Mr Graves, the postmaster, who both, as Kosenko points out, also organize and control the lottery. What these feminist and Marxist interpretations share is an understanding of the ritual as a means of social control - albeit serving slightly different interests - and the belief that the choice of the scapegoat is not entirely coincidental. While the process of selecting a victim does certainly reflect social power relations – first, a family is selected with only the eldest male entitled to draw, with women assigned to the male households they marry into – the fact that the victim chosen is the appropriate one to the specific purpose appears at odds with the fact that everyone in the village takes part and draws a slip of paper. At this stage, critics are often grasping at straws to explain how the “correct” victim is chosen, with Oehlschlaeger (1988:264), for instance, arguing that a male victim could be chosen since “the lottery must appear to be fair” but ultimately claiming that the selection process must be somehow unfair, as Tessie states, and that “it is reasonable to assume that its lack of fairness would be evident only to the victim”. Similarly, 39 (UN)REALITY INTENSIFIED Kosenko (1985:32) suggests that the lottery method used in order to choose the scapegoat is meant to give the appearance of f democratic legitimacy to the outcome, but falls back in the end on a convoluted claim that the lottery is a metaphor for “the unconscious ideological mechanisms of scapegoating” and that “an arbitrary lottery [...] is an image of the village’s blindness to its own motives”. Other critics have examined the mathematically possible outcomes of the two-stage process of the lottery in order to assess whether it is truly fair or not, and Joseph Church (1988:11) contends that Jackson’s choice of verbs connected to the act of drawing a paper - everyone in the village “takes” a slip of paper, except the town’s elite, Summers, Martin, and Graves, who “select” a paper - is evidence that the lottery is rigged. And yet there is a way to account for the arbitrariness of the lottery without relying on verbal gymnastics, namely, René Girard’s (1966) theory on scapegoating and religion, and its requirement of choosing an arbitrary victim. 3. A Girardian interpretation It should be noted that this is not the first attempt to apply Girard’s ideas to Jackson’s text. John Lamerson (2010:26) has seen Girard’s theory as explaining why the village chooses an innocent victim once a year as a human sacrifice - it is a way to “release pent aggression” that would otherwise boil over into infighting and rivalries. This ritualized violence allows the villagers to live in peace for the rest of the year, and explains why there is no mention in the text of “jails, criminals, or prisons”, “police force or sheriff”. Unfortunately, Lamerson’s (2010:25) application of Girard’s theory to the story is very brief, and while he is correct when stating that “Girard demonstrates that a societal need to restore harmony within a community requires violence against an innocent individual, and it requires the violence to be performed in a ritualized/religious format”, he incorrectly identifies what Girard claims is the trigger for ritualized violence. It is not that “a lack of natural resources necessarily leads to a desire for violence” (ibid.), but an even more fundamental aspect of human psychology that incites violence - it is what Girard has termed “mimetic desire”. Here, a somewhat deeper analysis of Girard’s ideas will help provide clues for understanding Jackson’s text. Girard (1977:81-86) conceives of violence as playing a generative role in the creation of human culture and religion.

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