What is it about, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson?
When it was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, the magazine was inundated with letters, many of them hostile, demanding an explanation. Why had this story been published? What did it mean? How could the author write such a story — especially a female author?!?
Yes, Shirley Jackson’s seemingly simple story spoke to the very complex issues of patriarchy, violence and “civil” society that lurk beneath the surface of our everyday lives.
I think about this whenever I read this story, which is at least once a year. I think about those people in 1948, picking up the New Yorker…
…It’s three years after the end of the Second World War, and people are trying to accommodate in their minds, the Holocaust. The real and terrible fact that a supposedly democratic and civilised European country had systematically murdered six-million Jewish people. But three years have passed and, perhaps, life is getting back to normal. Business is booming in the USA, wages are rising, and things are looking up…
And then they turned their attention to the little story in the New Yorker… the little story called, “The Lottery”, which starts so benignly; so soothingly; so recognisably … us.
And in a few smart paragraphs Shirley Jackson had smashed their semblance of regained comfort into tiny pieces.
I think about those first readers of “The Lottery” … and then I think about the first time I read the story, sometime in the late 90s. I, like those first readers in 1948, knew nothing about it. I stumbled across it in an anthology of American short stories, and almost turned the page… But something in those first lines… the lush summer ... it was perfect, a bit too perfect, and … and .. what lottery? What was this lottery?
What fascinates me is that despite the intervening seventy years since its publication, “The Lottery” still has the power to shock us, to shake us … to leave us asking why. As it did to me, as I sat there in the library aisle, not quite believing what I’d just read.
This is the power of fiction. This is the power of stories.
And this is why we should read Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery”, and why I love it.
To listen to the story, read by author, A M Homes, click this link!
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/a-m-homes-reads-shirley-jackson