Use Of Irony And Allegory In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson was met with heavy criticisms, consumer complaint, and even hate mail when it was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker. The story of a New England town with an annual “lottery,” in which the community gathers together for two hours in the midmorning to follow an age-old ritual of a random drawing that ends in one member of the populace being stoned to death. No one is exempt from this lottery: the town’s eldest citizen, Old Man Warner, is 77 and the youngest, little Davy Hutchinson, have an equal chance of being drawn. Jackson’s story is filled with irony and allegory as she paints a beautiful sunny day, leading the readers of the New Yorker to demand to know where these lotteries were taking place. “The

Lottery” has been influential in American literature ever since it was first published due to it’s challenging stance on tradition and the dangers of following the crowd.
The townsfolk go along with the lottery with reluctance to change. They have blind obedience to the spoken and unspoken rules of the lottery, and continue to keep the ceremony and structure of the lottery alive year after year, despite not knowing when or under what circumstances the lottery was established. This can be evidenced in several areas of the text, such as “Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box.” (Jackson 5). This ritual is blindly followed. The villagers arrive in the town square at ten in the morning and know that they will be home by noon, to eat lunch or go back to work, despite the fact that they have just murdered one of their own who may have been a friend, neighbor, or even a family member; simply because this is the way it has always been done (1). Even the oldest member of the town, Old Man, does not know the origin of the lottery. This is expressed in many ways in the text. Firstly, the stool that the black box sits on is older than Old Man Warner: “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been long lost ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born.” (5) Warner, when faced with the idea that other towns have ‘quit’ lotteries, said:
‘“Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.’” (23)
The lottery, in this town, has become more of a force than a ritual.

It has no explanation behind it, except for an old adage about how a lottery would bring a successful crop yield. The lottery is self-perpetuated by the townspeople, who blindly follow the ritual because it is the way they know. It is evident that the people who live in this town, with it’s population of more than three hundred (1), are trained from a young age to follow the practice; at the beginning of the story, the school-aged boys are collecting stones before the reader is aware of the true nature of the lottery, as well as Davy Hutchinson being assisted in choosing a slip out of the lottery box: ‘“Take a paper out of the box, Davy." Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed.”’ (65) "Take just one paper." Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly. (65) The tradition is self-perpetuating, as each child is presented to the community as a “blank slate” and must be taught the ways of the

lottery.
The lottery is a tradition that is followed year by year, despite not knowing the origins of the ritual. Shirley Jackson uses characterization to show that attempts to violate this social norm can be dangerous. The “deviant” from the norm is Tessie Hutchinson, also referred to as Mrs. Hutchinson. Tessie identifies herself immediately as a member of the outgroup when she arrives late for the lottery, saying she “clean forgot what day it was.” (7) By forgetting the importance of the lottery, she has marked herself as different from the crowd. Tessie shows shows deviance from other aspects of the society as well, namely the patriarchal nature of the town. While the other women are quiet and only speak amongst themselves during the lottery proceedings, Tessie tells her husband to “get on up there.” (31) This causes the townsfolk around her to laugh, but it also draws attention to her. Once Tessie herself is chosen in the lottery, she begins to protest, despite other townspeople explaining to her that they all took the same chance. Although Tessie was initially eager to begin the lottery, she objects forcefully when she is drawn. She even tries to subject her own daughter to her fate: “There’s Don and Eva… Make them take their chance!” (50) despite knowing that daughters, once married off, belong to their husband. Tessie also complains that Bill did not have a fair amount of time to draw from the box (61), and repeats several times that it isn’t fair. Despite this, Tessie is the one who is stoned at the end of the story. Her role as the scapegoat, though random, can be predicted. A lottery is randomized, but if this event were viewed as an election, Tessie would have been chosen just the same. By speaking out against the lottery, she becomes the sacrificial victim out of the need for her to be silenced.
This series of events shows many things about the nature of the town and its inhabitants. The townspeople, including Bill Hutchinson and Tessie’s three children, all younger than sixteen, feel no sympathy for Tessie and do not listen to her pleas. This can be seen in the behavior of Tessie’s children when drawing their own slips. “Nancy and Bill Jr. opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.” (71) These children were celebrating even though that they know that their mother or father would draw the slip that indicated they were going to die. When it is time for the stoning, the community mindlessly remembered the significance of the most violent portion of the act. “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.” (76) Despite the continued pleading and begging of Mrs. Hutchinson, the townspeople continue with their routine, as it is what they know to do. Most horrifically, Jackson states that “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles,” (78) allowing him to assist in the sacrifice of his own mother. Even members of the crowd who had posed questions, such as Mr. and Mrs. Adams who each individually brought up the prospect of other towns giving up lotteries (22), go along with it in the end, becoming unthinking members of a group and losing their unique singularity. It is with these elements that Jackson highlights the consequences of blind obedience and of the reluctance of people to reject primeval traditions.
This community, however, may need the lottery in order to function, as the lottery establishes a social order. The order begins with Mr. Summers, who owns the coal company and is the executor of the lottery, but is also described as controlling “the square dances, the teen club, and the Halloween program” (4). Mr. Summers is the most powerful man in the town, who wears jeans but also a crisp white shirt to conduct the lottery. Underneath Mr. Summers are Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin, the postmaster and the grocer. These men control the town economically and politically. While none of these positions seem inherently evil, nor does the head of a coal company seem to be in control of the populace, until the black spot on the lottery slip (which indicates the victim) is described. “Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office.” (74) Peter Konsenko argues in “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’” that the blackness of coal represents the evil of Mr. Summer’s business (Konsenko 7). These three men, then, control the working men in the village. It is assumed that all men in the village work, and all boys go to school until a certain age and then continue on until the workforce. This society is an extreme patriarchal society. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, expresses her opinion that the female characters in “The Lottery” are written to be rigid within the domestic gender norms (Cohen 53). This is true: the female characters are subject to domestic household roles and are shown to be quieter; this is present even in the young girls who shy away from the rambunctious playing of the young boys in the beginning of the short story. Women are subordinate in the socioeconomic hierarchy of the village, and this is regulated by the lottery. The men must choose for their families, and as seen in the context of the Hutchinson’s daughter Eva, once a daughter is married she belongs to the family of her husband. There are two cases in which the men, or head of the house, cannot draw for their families in the lottery. In the instance of the Dunbar family, Mr. Dunbar has a broken leg, and therefore cannot work. Mr. Dunbar does have a son, but he is sixteen and is not in the workforce. Therefore, Mrs. Dunbar draws for their family. In the Watson family, their head of house, Mr. Watson, is dead. Jack Watson, his son, is in the workforce, and can therefore draw for his mother and the rest of his family (Jackson 16). By this logic, the head of household is not the oldest male, but the oldest working male (Kosenko 10). Women in this community have no direct connection to the economy - they are essentially disenfranchised – and therefore have no place in the lottery proceedings, except in the absence of a “grown” working male. Without the structure of the lottery, the social order in this society would be destroyed, and the functional economy that the community was built off may fall.
The publication of “The Lottery” in The New Yorker in 1948 was followed by hundreds of responses from readers: only 13 came with a positive remark, and these were all from friends of Jackson. The world was disgusted with the story, especially in the context of recent historical events. Shirley Jackson’s biographer, Ruth Franklin, wrote:
“In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they did not realize exactly what they were looking at.”
Many of the letter-writers requested to know what towns these lotteries were taking place in, so they could visit and observe the next lottery, believing that such an event would take place in what was actively becoming modern New England.
Shirley Jackson herself was born in 1916 to a socialite but verbally abusive mother and grew up writing, even getting works published while a college student at Syracuse University.

As an adult, she struggled with mental and physical illness and was accused of being a witch and a psychic because of her interest in black magic and witchcraft. “The Lottery” was not her first publication in The New Yorker, but it certainly was the most controversial. Despite receiving hundreds of letters inquiring to the true meaning of the story, Jackson died at the age of 41. She insisted that “The Lottery” was written all at one time, in a twenty-minute session, with just a burst of inspiration. It’s been rumored that “The Lottery” was written after Jackson herself was stoned by children in town. After her death, Jackson’s husband Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote that Jackson “consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or to promote her work in any fashion… she believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough through the years.” (Murphy). Almost seventy years later, “The Lottery” continues to be discussed, analyzed, and torn apart in search of a meaning, but the true intentions of Jackson remain as unknown as the origins of the lottery

itself.