Shirley Jackson's reflection of madness in "The Lottery"

Shirley Jackson is the kind of writer that demonstrates a reflection of what she saw around her in her fiction. To some degree, Jackson's most well-known and widely read work, the short story the Lottery has eclipsed her other works as its messages were so profound that the critics still discuss what the story expressed within the context of Jackson's life and times. Early response to the work was in fact so profound that Jackson herself jokes about having to obtain a larger post office box to contain all the letters she received after the story was in print.

Gelfant and Graver 310) Jackson's work is a reflection of the undercurrent of madness that drove the events of her lifetime, events like the holocaust, a seemingly mindless response to human fear and anti-Semitic traditions that overtook the entire world to some degree, and allowed it to nearly destroy an arbitrary enemy.

Hague 73) Jackson's life as a mother and housewife is reflected in her expression of the everyday life of the characters in the Lottery and the macabre turn of events is reflective of the arbitrary nature of the events of the disaster of war that developed on a large scale the need to question humanity and human motivation.

Though Jackson was able to put the response to the Lottery into perspective many people were critical of her work, as it reflected reality and unreality in a rather truthful light, given the period in which she wrote the work. Her work, for many people reflected a negative side of humanity that many would prefer to deny or subvert, especially with regard to the roles of women in the period as well as the arbitrary nature of defining and annihilating an enemy. Too many, Jackson's works and especially the Lottery were an obvious reflection of her own madness. Being that she lived a rather mundane life as a mother and wife, this would seem a challenge to her role as a woman. She stepped outside of her visible role and condemned the madness of her time.

Hague 73)

Miss Jackson shocks her readers into instant attention by the effective juxtaposition of startling incident and unusual characters.... In addition to being a first-class story-teller, she has always been concerned with the conflict between good and evil in a world deplorably deficient in common sense, kindness, and magnanimity in the Aristotelian sense. William Peden. Saturday Review. March 8, 1958. p. 18

(Dorothy Nyren 248)

According to some modern critics the ideas that were furthered in her works have been subverted by the fact that she is known almost exclusively for the Lottery and one other novel the Haunting of Hill House. Critics today would like people to take a more reflective view of the body of Jackson's prolific works and allow them to come together as a guide for understanding Jackson's skill as a writer.

History has not been kind to Shirley Jackson. Today she is remembered almost entirely for her much-anthologized short story "The Lottery" (1948) and her 1959 novel the Haunting of Hill House, a fact that does not do justice to the number and complexity of the novels and short stories she produced. (1)

Hague 73)

One of Jackson's greatest supporters was of coarse her husband, a literary critic. Hyman collected and critiqued his wife's work after her death and commented on the cruelty that for the most part a single bit of her fiction has defined people's understanding of her, and labeled her as a deviant. Though he also goes on to stress that Jackson's popularity, though she received little recognition in her lifetime would eventually make it into the cannon of works that are enduring and reflective of her time and her messages would lie on.

In his preface to a posthumously published collection of her work, the Magic of Shirley Jackson (1965), her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote that "for all her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition. She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led. She saw these honors go to inferior writers."

Shinn 45)

According to Shinn, Shirley Jackson challenges the label and the cost. Though many critics dismiss her work as gothic horror tales-finding it magical, bizarre, even mad -- they miss the real significance: Jackson succeeds in revealing the "divinest sense" in much of women's madness, and she helps to identify the madness as the social disease it is -- inherited through patriarchal traditions or transmitted from unhealthy social relationships and expectations. A woman is mad, Chesler has told us, when she is "too" female or when she appropriates those traits allotted by her society to men: in either case, this generally means whenever she allows her inner self to come to the surface and obscure her roles -- whenever the independence of Lilith or the unpredictability of Undine emerges. Neither patriarchal myth nor psychology, which so often justifies itself through myth, encourages female maturation. Yet Jung himself has directed us to learn about life and ourselves by first turning inward: "proceed from the dream outward." Jackson does precisely this in her fiction, considering the dream much as it is defined by Anais Nin in the Novel of the Future (1968): The definition of a dream is: ideas and images in the mind not under the command of reason. It is not necessarily an image or an idea that we have during sleep. It is merely an idea or image which escapes the control of reasoning or rational mind....

Shinn 48)

Jackson notes in her biography that even her mother was a caustic critic of the Lottery

Gelfant and Graver 310) even though the work has become one of the most widely reprinted works of American literature its early response unnerved Jackson as her life became one of almost instant notoriety and sadly unscrupulous condemnation.

A imes headlined her long obituary "Shirley Jackson, Author of Horror Classic."

Jackson's life, was rather a mundane one, though she was well educated and developed her literary skill in academia, in partnership with her future husband. Jackson was born in San Francisco, to father Leslie Jackson, an English immigrant and Geraldine Bugbee Jackson, who was related to the famous California architects, an association some give credit for driving her sense of place and detail for architecture in her stories. She spent most of her years in Vermont and is associated as a New England writer. The last work Jackson published, like the Lottery was one of a macabre chance occurrence. "Home" (1965), the last work Jackson published before her death, describes an outsider's dangerous encounter with the ghost of a small boy who is trying to return to the country house she and her husband have innocently purchased."

Hall 311) Hall also goes on to state that her early life in the suburbs of California is reflected in her first novel, the Road Through the Wall (1948), He also noted that many of her early stories were self published in the magazine she and her husband founded at Syricuse University, Spectre.

Their outspoken editorials on civil rights anticipated "After You, My Dear Alphonse" (1942), a critique of a middle-class housewife who foolishly assumes that her young son's African-American friend comes from a large, poor, and lazy family. It was Jackson's first story for the New Yorker. Jackson and Hyman were married on August 13, 1940, in New York City, and her jobs at a radio station, an advertising agency, and Macy's department store supplemented his modest income from the New Republic and the New Yorker.

It was relatively early in the marriage of these two literary giants that they moved to Vermont and began to develop collaborative and individual works. Jackson's life was clearly a juxtaposition of family demands as well as literary goals. She worked several mundane jobs to help the family make ends meet, and wrote on the side, selling her fiction to many publications to again supplement the family income.

When Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College in 1945 and they moved to Vermont, Jackson's sense of dislocation paralleled that of many of her lonely characters. She wrote several hours a day, typing manuscripts between RT.A. meetings, baseball games, and pajama parties for her four children. Family activities inspired more than thirty semiautobiographical comic stories, which Jackson sold to Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Harper's, and other magazines. The most frequently anthologized of these is "Charles," which ends with an O. Henry twist when the startled mother of a new kindergartener realizes that the terror of the classroom is her own son.

Many also consider Jackson an innovator in family comedy and her subjects and characters were often mundane people dealing with circumstances outside of the real and their control.

A she skillfully pieced most of these stories into the fictionalized memoirs Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), yet she discounted the literary merit of such work. As recent scholars have demonstrated, however, the popular domestic narratives of writers like Jackson,... are a major branch of American women's humor and a mirror of post World War II culture. Jackson's family stories also bear the hallmarks of her more serious short and long fiction. Ordinary situations turn strange, even nightmarish.

The character of her fiction expresses both an internal and external desire to connect the mundane of sports matches and PTA meetings with the undercurrent of unreality that can overtake the mind in waking dreams. Jackson's creativity is clearly demonstrated in her works of differing lengths and subjects as a creation of much time spent thinking and wondering what others were thinking at the same time.

The haunted tower of a country mansion in "A Visit" and the demonic stranger who mesmerizes a young woman in "The Rock" are among Jackson's occasional gothic touches, but the oddness of her fiction more often inheres in the everyday. In "The Summer People," for example, an elderly husband and wife stay at their lake cottage after Labor Day, only to find themselves cut off from the outside world, awaiting probable death at the hands of resentful villagers "a violent defense of tradition that parallels the acThe Lottery; or, the Adventures of James Harris (1949), the only collection that Jackson made of her short fiction, capitalized on the impact of the title story in the New Yorker. Jackson grouped her twenty-five tales into four sections, inserted transitional passages from a witchcraft treatise, revised stories to emphasize a mysterious stranger named James Harris, and appended the "demon lover" ballad to clarify the subtitle of the book.

Hall 312) biographical description of the Lottery demonstrates the connectedness that Jackson felt to her work, and though there is a clear sense that her fiction is not directly reflective of real events it is a reflection of the idea that there is in every small town or large city an undercurrent of unspoken truths that frequently dominates the subtext of culture and social interaction.

Jackson's most famous story opens on a beautiful June 27 as villagers gather for an annual lottery that is held concurrently in other towns. According to the biographer Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson's own town of North Bennington was the model for both its modern setting and its characters. Playful children arrive on the square before their busy parents, and the boys make a large pile of the "smoothest and roundest" stones, whose grim purpose is revealed only at the story's conclusion. Other foreshadowings are equally unobtrusive. The townspeople keep their distance from the lottery equipment and hesitate when Mr. Summers asks them to steady the black box so he can mix up the slips of paper inside. The degree of ceremony is puzzling: families line up together, lists of kinship networks have been prepared, and every able-bodied person must attend. People seem reluctant to get the winning ticket, and there are rumors that other villages are going to stop holding the lottery; but Old Man Warner counters with a proverb: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." When Bill Hutchinson draws the slip with a black spot, his wife shatters the morning calm, shouting that Mr. Summers rushed Bill's selection. Tessie herself receives the marked paper after the five Hutchinsons draw to determine which family member will win the final round. As the desperate woman screams, "It isn't fair," the town advances against her, armed with stones from the boys' stockpile. "The Lottery" has provoked a variety of critical responses, including mythic, feminist, and Marxist approaches. Jackson told her New Yorker editor that "The Lottery" was "just a story" with no special theme, but Oppenheimer says she told a friend it was about "the Jews," recent victims of Nazi terror in World War II.

Hall 312-313)

Jackson was a creative writer of the greatest caliber and she utilized her knowledge and her current context, as well as that of the world in which she lived, the character of women often falling prey to the unknown terror of symbolic and real sacrifice.

A student of folklore, Jackson employed archetypes of scapegoating and seasonal sacrifice, timing the lottery near the summer solstice, when farming communities labor to ensure a rich harvest. The three-legged stool that supports the ominously black box could be a modern version of the Greek tripod of prophecy, and the container itself recalls Pandora's box of woes. A neighbor reminds the distraught Tessie that each villager "took the same chance"; however, in Jackson's fiction, women have a knack for drawing disaster.

Jackson would likely have called herself a feminist, if she had not had such a sense of the frivolity of her works. She tended to come across in interviews not as an object of the horror that she depicts in her work but someone with a good sense of the comic nature of the world. She belittled her works, describing them as Just stories even though the messages within them were often biographically and contextually brilliant.