Tess Hutchinson Character Analysis Essay

Character Analysis of Tessie Hutchinson

“The Lottery” is a tale that was written in 1948 by American author Shirley Jackson. Throughout the story, there are multiple characters introduced, but the character who is most directly confronted with conflict after the climax is Tessie Hutchinson. At the point of the climax, Tessie becomes the protagonist of the story. Her actions also cause her to become the central character. She is a well-liked citizen of a village that participates in a lottery to determine which citizen will be killed as a yearly sacrifice to ensure a prosperous corn growing season. Mrs. Hutchinson is a round character because she starts off enthused and cheerful and even jokes around during general conversation as the village people gather to start the lottery

drawing.

She then becomes distressed once the results determined that her family has pulled the paper marked with oil, which means one of them will be killed. She grows so desperate that she even attempts to have her married daughter added to her family’s drawing to decrease her chances of being the person who is stoned. Mrs. Hutchinson did not have to suffer the sad fate of being stoned. The dialogue between other villagers, as recounted by a non-participant narrator, reveals that there are other villages that participate in a lottery of their own, but there are also surrounding towns and villages that have stopped sharing in the tradition of the lottery. Why do they feel so obliged to live by the tradition of the yearly sacrifice? She and her family could simply leave the village and live in a township that has done away with the outdated practice.

The characters in “The Lottery”

are willingly participating in the drawing because that is what they were taught to do. They are simply joining in the rituals that have occurred for surely all of their lives. It’s no different from our culture today cooking lots of food and eating until we are completely stuffed on Thanksgiving. Around the world, there are many groups of people who participate in rituals and keep traditions alive that others see as strange and bizarre. For example, in certain groups of the Dani Tribe of Indonesia, women physically express grief by cutting off a segment of one of their fingers. Like some of the neighboring villages in “The Lottery”, that are starting to disremember the practice, this custom is rarely, but still sporadically, practiced in the tribe. However, some cultures do regularly practice some rather uncanny rituals. There is the Yanomami tribe who live in villages within the Amazon rainforest, near the border of Venezuela and Brazil. They are known for their tradition of endo-cannibalism, which is consuming the flesh of a member of one’s own tribe, usually after they have died (Bhatt). Also, the Toraja people of Indonesia exhume the corpses of their fellow villagers to clean their clothes and coffins. The corpse is draped in special garments and paraded around the village. The 1978 “Jonestown Massacre” can also be used as an example of a group of people that followed along with traditions or beliefs that seemed to not make any sense. On November 18, 1978, more than 900 members of an American cult called the Peoples Temple died in a mass suicide-murder under the direction of their leader Jim Jones (1931-78) (History.com).
Through the writer’s exposition of the atmosphere, images of are created in your mind of a tranquil village on a clear sunny morning, being awakened by the sounds of children being warmed by fresh sunlight while playing and running through fields of blooming flowers and fresh green grass. In direct contrast to this warm sunny setting, images are also created of the grim and barbaric side of the set of events that are soon to happen. The explanations of the shabby, ragged box that the villagers used to draw their fates, and the black dot on the piece of paper create a mindset of darkness and sure death for one of the villagers.
The author of this story did a good job of describing the scene of the village as well as the actions and personalities of the characters. As a reader, I understood Mrs. Hutchinson’s anguish and death to be a necessary sacrifice and compromise that she made for the survival of the village. The Hutchinson family, along with any other family, or individual from the village could have started a homestead elsewhere, or gathered with a near-by town. They all, however casually elected to perform the deadly ceremony every year.