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Literature & Language
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Shirley Jackson's The Lottery: Advanced Theme Of The Story (Essay Sample)

Instructions:

student was asked to choose a short story from shirley jackson's anthology and discuss how the setting advanced the theme of the story.

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Content:
The story that I have chosen from Shirley Jackson’s anthology is The Lottery. I will be discussing the setting and how it advanced the theme. The Lottery is a short fiction about a small town that casually sentences one person from the community to death every year. The town makes the decision of who will be the victim by drawing lots from an old black box that has the names of each family’s head of household. The family members of the man who gets the doomed paper will then pick one paper each from another set of papers. The one who gets the paper with a black mark will be stoned to death. I think that this story is one that is shocking to the very end and the way the setting has been established has effectively helped in moving the story forward.
In his essay, Hilton has said that Jackson’s stories always have a note of alarm (250). Toward the end of the story, when it becomes apparent that the pile of stones that the children were collecting in the beginning were in fact meant to be thrown at the victim (Jackson 302), the surprise heightens. The role that the setting has played toward building this element of surprise is very important. The setting of the story helped set the readers’ expectations of what kind of culture these people have that they might resort to such kinds of acts. In the beginning, Jackson discusses how the village only had a population of about 300 and so the whole ordeal only took two hours, just in time for the villagers to go back to their normal activities (291). The fact that these villagers set out to execute someone so casually and go back to their days’ activities has a dreadful effect to readers. As it was stated, the effect is in the “calm narration culminating, almost casually, in dreadfulness – a method that has often been employed for macabre humor” (Hilton p.250 para.2). Jackson’s use of the setting has also made the story believable. She has supplied a “great deal of concrete detail to make us “believe” in her village” (Hilton p.251 para.1).
One of these details so vividly present in her setting was the square in which the lottery was conducted and how all the villagers gathered in it for such a tradition. Jackson described the square where all the folks so naturally piled up almost without hesitation for the activity, as well as intricate details in the square such as the paraphernalia used for the lottery like the stool and the black box (294). The details of how the crowd was gathered in the square also immensely helped to advance the theme of the story. In the square, the children were gathered in the front (Jackson 294) denoting that in this town’s culture, it is also natural for the children to join in in such an execution. Jackson’s use of summer for the setting also seem to have a significance. She has vividly described the 27th of June when the lottery was conducted as a normal summer day when flowers were abloom and the grass was green (Jackson 291). According to Yarmove, the fact that June 27 falls between summer solstice and Fourth of July shows a “contrast between superstitious paganism and rational democracy, a dynamic that plays a central role in ‘The Lottery’ especially in light of the story’s locale” (Shields p.414 para.1). Other details in the setting also provided insights to different societal issues such as sexism.
In the story, Jackson wrote the setting in such a way that it strongly shows the contrast between the men and women, their activities and their role in the community. In the beginning, when the villagers were starting to gather at the square, the men stood together speaking about planting, tractors, and taxes while the women told each other gossips and tended to their children (Jackson 291). She effectively shows the old patriarchal culture where families relied on the men for matters such as making money and the women to be homemakers. Even the fact that the host of the lottery was a man, in this case Mr. Summers and the very act of the drawing of lots, where it was the men who stepped forward to take a slip of paper, is a masterful portrayal of how women has to “submit control of their sexuality to men of secular and priestly authority. The design of the lottery is without flaw; it serves perfectly the patriarchal purpose of denying women consciousness by insisting that they remain part of nature, part of the fertile earth itself” (Oehlshlaeger 270). Jackson also showed readers with the use of the setting how people act when they are part of a group.
The setting showed how traditions like that of the small town’s are so naturally accepted that no one ever questions it. In a study conducted on ninth graders, when asked to discuss the motivations and culpability of the villagers in the lottery, a student has said that the villagers simply had to and that they had no choice (Berne, J. and Clark, K. 1). In such a ritual, even the victim willingly goes to the slaughter (Wall 40). Even though in the story, Mrs. Hutchinson cried that the way her husband drew the paper was unfair, she still did not run for her life. She still willingly stood there to be stoned to death, accepting the act as something that must be done. She did not question the ritual, only the process on how her husband drew the lot (Jackson 302).
This idea of human sacrifice in a ritual has multifaceted effects. It also rewards the participants who so willingly threw the stones to the victim or the human sacrifice. In such a case as a human sacrifice, Wall states that such action is unlikely to be a response simply to the thought or concept that their sacrifice will force nature or a god or other spirit entities to award them (40). In the same statement, she pointed out that such sacrifices have recognizes generosity in the group, that the victim s...
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