Shirley Jackson\'s 1948 Short Story

¶ … Shirley Jackson's 1948 short story The Lottery describes a ritualistic practice in a fictional New England village. The entire short story describes relatively mundane details of a traditional practice within the town whereby all of the village residents participate in a public lottery drawing. Only at the very end of the story does the author reveal that the lottery is actually a horrific ritualistic ceremony in which one townsperson is arbitrarily selected for execution by stoning at the hands of all the other townspeople, including children, and at least in this case, the husband of the woman who draws the losing lottery slip.

Jess Blumberg's 2007 historic retrospective about the infamous Salem, Massachusetts Witch Trials provides a detailed account of the well-documented atrocities that took place in Salem at the end of the 17th century. The author details the manner in which several hundred people were executed, often by brutally tortuous means such as being burned alive or slowly crushed under heavy weight. The work provides a historic background of the phenomenon, beginning with the witch craze that swept through Europe from the 13th through the 17th centuries. It continues by intimating that the influx of displaced upstate New York and Canadian refugees from King William's War of 1689 into the Salem area played a significant role by virtue of their being foreigners who competed with long-time Salem residents for work and resources.

Similarities and Differences between the Works

Both works describe the details of horrific events in which innocent people were put to death by their communities and provide a glimpse into the depths of moral depravity that entire human communities are capable of supporting and perpetrating. In the case of The Lottery, Jackson describes how small children are included in the atrocity and deliberately uses mundane elements such as about the two-hour time period involved and the piling up of stones by young boys to help communicate that unjustified murder of random people is nothing more than a brief interruption of an otherwise ordinary day in the lives of the townspeople. That is precisely what generates the shock when readers realize, only at the end of the story, that all of those mundane descriptions were actually the prelude and preparation for murder. Both works involve the manner in which otherwise ordinary communities of church-going, moral people can support and participate in morally heinous practices under the right circumstances and influences.