The Lottery Patriarchal Analysis

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Recommended: Women in patriarchal

Gabrielle Hatley-Lewis
Lucas Brown
English 175
21 January 2017
The Lottery: Women in a Patriarchal Society
The Lottery, written in 1948, is a work authored by Shirley Jackson. It was featured in the New Yorker during the same year of its publication. The story takes place in a small village on the 27th of June a bit after school has ended for the children. There is a ceremony taking place adequately named the lottery. Each male of the household takes a slip of paper from a black box; a woman must perform the act if no man is available for said house. If the slip has a black mark on it then each member of the house must choose another slip until the black mark is found again. Once it has been found, the person that has received it is stoned …show more content…

Tessie at first seems overly eager to participate in the lottery. The narrator points out that the men are seen standing away from the stones and when jokes are passed among each other, they smile rather than laugh. Comparing this to Tess, she "[comes] hurriedly along the path to the square" (8) and is reassured that she's "in time, though" (8). She then eagerly tells her husband to pick out a paper from the box. Her eagerness is soon vanquished when it is her who has "won" the lottery. She offers up her own daughter and son-in-law as the townspeople ascend upon her. Adding more salt to the already opened wound, her husband tells her to be quiet when she begins to contest the selection. Bill, her husband and head of the household, is ashamed of her antics and must blend with the crowd of people. One can speculate that he does not wish to be given the same fate as his wife. Tess represents the struggles that women must overcome, i.e., being silenced for speaking out for their rights. In the same way that she speaks up for the unfairness of the lottery and women’s rights, she also symbolizes them being killed. Being stoned to death is much in the same way that the women’s rights were being …show more content…

In the beginning we witness the peaceful ceremony of the lottery in the town. We then witness a murder of a woman all without the slightest change in tone or diction from the narrator. The tone in which it is written is like an underscore to the horror that is the lottery and in reality, the treatment of women during this time. It shifts from a realism that we can connect with to a sort of nightmarish symbolism.
The setting also plays a role in the nightmare that is the lottery. It takes place in a quiet, relatively normal village. This leads us as readers to believe that the lottery can then take place anywhere. Jackson’s critique of the village is America-wide as we can not contain the violence of the lottery to one village or town. It appears as though she is critiquing society as a whole by not speaking of any one community.
The Lottery is told by third person objective rather than through the point of view of a villager. The narrator is detached from the village and rather than telling us the thoughts and feelings of the villagers, they let the story unfold and let us make our own inferences. The only way we are able to tell what the villagers are thinking and feeling is through the nervous ways that they laugh or the way they look

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