Since its first appearance in The New Yorker on June 28, 1948, Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” has become somewhat of a literary phenomenon. Over the years, the story has been “anthologized, dramatized, televised, and even [. . .] made into a ballet” (“On the Morning” 227). Much of the story’s popularity is owed to its having stirred up quite a disagreement over what the story’s ultimate interpretation should be. To this day, “The Lottery” is discussed heatedly in classrooms and Internet forums, while serious debates continue to rage over whether “[t]he stool beneath the box, which is described as ‘three-legged,’ may or may not be significant as a symbol” in Jackson’s “The Lottery” (Friedman 74).
Yet in the midst of all this ado, who better to know what the story is truly “about” than the one who wrote the story? Indeed, many seem to prefer the critics’ overly-elaborate, often far-fetched interpretations than Jackson’s own simpler, more realistic one.
One of the most fashionable interpretations is that of the scapegoat. In fact, it is difficult to find an essay dealing with “The Lottery,” that doesn’t have the following quote in it somewhere: “‘Lottery in June; corn be heavy soon'” (“The Lottery”). When talking about the notion of the scapegoat, this quote is used to illustrate the purpose of the scapegoat rite, and thus stiffens the argument that the story is “Jackson’s modern representation of the primitive annual scapegoat rite” (Lainhoff 223). To Seymour Lainhoff, there exists a dual purpose to the rite: “to exorcise the evils of the old year by transferring them to some inanimate or animate objects, and with that [. . .] to appease the forces of the new year, to insure fertility” (223).
Another, more interesting, interpretation is that which links “The Lottery” to some grandiose feminist statement. This theory is, in essence, that the story deals primarily with the oppression and “subjugation of women in a patriarchal society” (Katz 244). Both Jennifer Katz and Darryl Hattenhauer agree. In her essay, Katz gives several good arguments. “There is no question that men control the village,” she writes. The men are like elderly statesmen who declare wars in which other people do the fighting.” She further explains how [t]he women are docile spectators until the victim is chosen; then they become bloodthirsty killers” who “have been conditioned to accept the lottery and to carry out its horrible climax,” and, “[b]ecause a married daughter draws with her husband’s family, sons are more desirable” (246). Hattenhauer adds, in Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, that “a married woman minimizes her chances of being selected by delivering babies early and often” (44).
While most of the theories floating around sound plausible, the most important voice in the matter is ultimately Shirley Jackson herself. In her essay, “On the Morning of June 28, 1948, and ‘The Lottery,'” Jackson takes the time to explain to her curious readers how the story came about. “The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller,” she writes. When she arrived home she quickly put the idea to paper, finding “that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause.” And even later, she found that the story needed little revision. In her own words: “[…] I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes” (226)
Now, had Jackson spent time mulling over the story line perhaps it would make more sense for us to append all these various meanings to it. But she did not spend weeks writing or thinking about the story and its implications. Jackson herself calls the finished product, “straightforward,” admitting pleasant surprise “at the ease with which it had been written.” Furthermore, Jackson repeatedly refused to give any interpretation for “The Lottery.” When asked by The New Yorker’s editor whether she wanted to “enlarge upon its meaning,” Jackson replied simply, “No […] it was just a story I wrote.” Later, she would go on to say the same thing, never wavering in her simple, albeit not-so-exciting, explanation (“On the Morning” 226).
As recently as 1984, in his “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,'” writer Peter Kosenko proposed that “The Lottery” represents an attack on the “essentially capitalist […] social order and ideology” of the town in which Jackson’s lottery had been set, claiming-in other words-that the story has Marxist undertones (27). Like other critics, Kosenko points to the smallest of details in the story to help further his claim. When Bill Hutchinson forces his wife Tessie to open her lottery slip to the crowd, Jackson writes, ‘It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with [a] heavy pencil in [his] coal-company office” (p. 301) [sic]. At the very moment when the lottery’s victim is revealed, Jackson appends a subordinate clause in which we see the blackness (evil) of Mr. Summers’ (coal) business being transferred to the black dot on the lottery slip. At one level at least, evil in Jackson’s text is linked to a disorder, promoted by capitalism, in the material organization of modern society. (28)
It is difficult to believe that someone who wrote a story so spur-of-the-moment would have been able to think out details so incredibly minute. Kosenko admits that Jackson had “never been identified as a Marxist.” He also claims that Jackson never said “that it was impossible for her to explain approximately what her story was about, only that it was ‘difficult,'” leaving it, more or less, open to his-or anyone’s-interpretation (27). However, after saying that an explanation might be difficult, Jackson does go on to try: “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 Friedman 64).
Indeed, most successful fiction authors do not sit and ponder for too long the symbolic meaning of their story over choosing to just write. Finding Forrester, a film about an eccentric agoraphobic author who befriends a poor yet talented young man, has insight to give about the writing process itself. Character William Forrester forbids his young disciple from thinking prior to writing: “No. No thinking,” he instructs, “That comes later. You write your first draft with your heart. And you rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think” (Finding Forrester). From what she has told us about the process of writing, it is likely that Jackson employed a similar style.
Even Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who meticulously ask “What of [the story’s] meaning?” admit that “[Jackson] has been wise not to confine the meaning to any precise happening of the sort [they have suggested in their essay]” (“Shirley Jackson” 225). In most likelihood, the story, if it makes any political statement at all, is just a very general statement-one about right and wrong in society in general. A commentator on BrothersJudd.Com actually puts it best: “Take it at relative face value and the Lottery represents any human institution which is allowed to continue unchallenged and unconsidered until it becomes a destructive, rather than a constructive, force in men’s lives.”
So, in conclusion, rather than imposing, or forcing, any meaning, perhaps we should consume the story at face value and realize that authors sometimes “just write.” A story needs not have some profound political, sociological, or philosophical implications in order to be enjoyable; to make us think; or even to become one of the most popular short stories of all time. As painter Jackson Pollock said when asked to explain his craft, “It’s just like a bed of flowers-you don’t have to tear your hair out over what it means” (Pollock).
Works Cited
Finding Forrester. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perf. Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, and Anna Paquin. Videocassette. Columbia, 2000.
