What do you make of Old Man Warner’s saying, “Lottery in June, corn beheavy soon” (paragraph 32)?
What will be an ideal response?
- The people simply accept the proceedings as an annual civic duty, which, based on the saying “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon,” can be interpreted as an up-to-date version of an ancient fertility ritual. The lottery takes place every year, even as the harvest comes every year, hinting that they view the lottery and the resulting stoning as essential. Perhaps the people even believe the corn will fail to flourish unless there is a human sacrifice.
Peter Hawkes of East Stroudsburg University finds an obstacle to teaching “The Lottery” in that many students think its central premise totally unrealistic and absurd. How, they assume, can this story have anything to do with me? Hawkes dramatizes the plausibility of the townspeople’s unswerving obedience to authority. With a straight face, he announces that the Dean has just decreed that every English teacher give at least one F per class to reduce grade inflation, passes around a wooden box, and tells students to draw for the fatal grade! “While I pass the box around the room, I watch carefully for, and indirectly encourage, the student who will refuse to take a slip of paper. When this happens, I ask the class what should be done. Invariably, someone in the class will say that the person who refused to draw deserves the F. Hearing this, the student almost always draws.” See Hawkes’s account in “The Two Lotteries: Teaching Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’” (Exercise Exchange, Fall 1987). We would expect a class to greet this trick with much skepticism. But what if you were to try it on them before assigning the story?
In teaching freshman composition, Doris M. Colter of Henry Ford Community College reports terrific success with this story. She starts with the question, “What characteristics of human nature does Jackson’s story reveal?” Her students’ responses serve as thesis statements for thousand-word essays. Students have to quote from the story itself and must bolster their theses by citing current news stories, films and TV programs, fiction, and any other evidence. One obvious thesis statement, “Rational people can act irrationally,” drew a torrent of evidence showing that latent evil lurks in people you wouldn’t suspect, perhaps in every one of us (one bright student even cited Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). Even more stimulating was the thesis “What is fair is not always right” or “Doing things the right way doesn’t always mean doing what is right.” Jackson’s observation rang true: “The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions.” Students recalled moments when they had vacuously recited words (prayers, the Pledge of Allegiance) or performed by rote, not thinking about the commitment they were making. One student recalled her own marriage vows, though the marriage had ended in divorce.
More controversial, Colter found, was the thesis, “‘The Lottery’ is a scathing parody of the biblical story of redemption.” Tessie, like Jesus, might be viewed as a sacrificial lamb whose death will save the community. The names of the characters carry religious connotations. Delacroix means “of the cross”; Adams connotes the first man. Colter remarks, “Jackson’s words—‘Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him’—are suggestive, at least subliminally, of a close association between the first sinner and the consequences of that sin.” If these interpretations seem far-fetched, perhaps they didn’t seem so to the members of one Michigan school board who thought Jackson’s story blasphemous and banned a textbook in which it appeared.
Yet another interpretation is possible. Jackson ran into parental opposition when she announced her intention of marrying fellow Syracuse University student Stanley Edgar Hyman, and some of her housemates warned her of the perils of living with a Jew. Shocked by these early run-ins with anti-Semitism, Jackson once told a friend (according to Judy Oppenheimer) that “The Lottery” was a story about the Holocaust. You and your students may offer other potential interpretations, but there are dangers, of course, in reading more meaning into the story than it will sustain. Jackson herself, in Come Along with Me (New York: Viking, 1968), insists that we accept the story at face value.
Language Arts & World Languages
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