An Analysis of "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson's

When Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948 issue of the
New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received" before:
hundreds of letters poured in, full of "bewilderment, speculation, and abuse." The reason:
Jackson's story portrays an "average" New England village with "average" citizens engaged in
a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery. Only
towards the end of the story do we suspect that the "winner" will be stoned to death by the
rest of the villagers. This response was not what Jackson had hoped for. In the July 22, 1948
issue of the San Francisco Chronicle she responded to her readers saying " what I had
hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal
ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic
dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."
There are many social details that link the lottery to the ordinary social practices of the village.
The tradition of the lottery reinforces the village's hierarchical social order by instilling the
villages with an unconscious fear that if they resist this order they themselves might be
selected in the next lottery. While creating this fear, it also produces the ideology necessary
for the smooth functioning of that social order, despite its inherent inequalities.
The story takes place on a hot summer's day. This will foreshadow the "hot" events that will
take place on the day of the lottery. The place is the small village which has a bank, a post
office, a grocery store, a coal business, a school system. The women are housewives rather
than field workers or writers and the men talk of "tractors and taxes." More importantly, the
village has the same socio-economic stratification found n a modern, capitalist society.
At the top of the social ladder is the village's most powerful man, Mr. Summers, who owns the
village's largest business (a coal concern) and is also its leader, since he has more "time and
energy [read money and leisure] to devote to civic activities" than others. (Summers' very
name suggests that he has become a man of leisure through his wealth.) Next in line is Mr.
Graves, the village's second most powerful government official: ts postmaster. (His name
may suggest the gravity of officialism.) Beneath Mr. Graves is Mr. Martin, who has the
economically advantageous position of being the grocer in a village of three hundred.
These three most powerful men who control the town, economically as well as politically, also
happen to administer the lottery. Mr. Summers is its official, sworn in yearly by Mr. Graves.
Mr. Graves helps Mr. Summers make up the lottery slips. Mr. Martin steadies the lottery box
as the slips are stirred. In the off season, the lottery box is stored either at their places of
business or their residences: "It had spent on year in Mr. Graves' barn and another year
underfoot in the post-office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left
there". Those who control the town also control the lottery. The lottery takes place in the
village square "between the post-office and the bank", two buildings which represent
government and finance, the institutions from which Summers, Graves, and Martin derive
their power.
However Mr. Summers is still the most powerful man in town. He is not only the wealthiest
businessman and officiates the lottery, but a symbol of evil. When Bill Hutchinson forces his
wife Tessie to open her lottery slip to the crowd, "It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr.
Summers had made the night before with [a] heavy pencil in [his] coal-company office". At
the very moment when the lottery's victim is revealed, we see the blackness (evil) of Mr.
Summers' (coal) business being transferred to the black dot on the lottery slip. Not only is the
lottery evil, but it is carried out by the most powerful buszinessman in the village, against a
helpless woman.
The lottery's rules of participation reflect a rigid social hierarchy based on an unequal social
division of labor. The participants in the lottery understand consciously that its outcome is
pure chance: a "democratic" aura that hides its first codifying function. The villagers believe
unconsciously that their commitment to a work ethic will somehow make them immune to

selection. But, this work ethic prevents them from understanding that the lottery's actual
function is not to encourage work, but to reinforce the unequal social division of labor.
Therefore, when Jackson chooses Tessie Hutchinson as the lottery's victim/scapegoat it
shows that the lottery is an ideological tradition used to defuse the average villager's deep,
unexpressed dissatisfaction with the social order in which he lives. Their unspoken anger can
be directed at the victims of that social order as they stone them to death. This happens year
after year, not because it is just "tradition," but because it serves the function of purging the
social body of all resistance ,so that business (capitalism) can go on as usual and the
Summers, the Graves and the Martins can remain in power.
Those who control the village economically and politically also administer the lottery. The
rules also tell us much about who has and who doesn't have power in the village's social
hierarchy. The rules determine who gets to choose slips in the lottery's first, second and third
rounds. Before the lottery, lists are "[made] up of heads of families [who choose in the first
round], heads of households [who choose in the second round], [and] members of each
household in each family [who choose in the last round]". The second round is missing from
the story because the family patriarch who selects the dot in the first round, Bill Hutchinson,
has no married male offspring. When her family is chosen in the first round, Tessie
Hutchinson objects that her daughter and son-in-law didn't "take their chance." Mr. Summers
has to remind her, "Daughters draw with their husbands' families". Power in the village, then,
is in the hands of male heads of families and households. The male heads of households, as
men in the work force, provide the link between the broader economy of the village and the
economy of the household. Some consideration of other single household families in the first
round of the lottery--the Dunbars and the Watsons--will help make this relationship between
economics and family power clearer. Mr. Dunbar, unable to attend the lottery because he has
a broken leg, has to choose by proxy. According to the rules of the lottery "grown boy[s]" take
precedence as proxies over wives. Mrs. Dunbar's son, Horace, who is only sixteen, is still in
school and not working; therefore Mrs. Dunbar chooses for Mr. Dunbar. Jack Watson, on the
other hand, whose father is dead, is clearly older than Horace and presumably already in the
work force. The "heads of households" are not simply the oldest males in their immediate
families; they are the oldest working males and get their power from their insertion into a
larger economy. Women, who have no direct link to the economy, as defined by capitalism,
choose in the lottery only in the absence of a "grown," working male.
Women have an inferior position in the socio-economic hierarchy of the village. They wear
"faded house dresses . . . [and walk] shortly after their menfolk". Their dresses indicate that
they do work, but because they work at home and not within the larger economy without any
pay, they are treated by the men as inferiors. When Tessie Hutchinson appears late to the
lottery, other men address her husband Bill, "here comes your Missus, Hutchinson". None of
the men think of addressing Tessie first, since she "belongs" to Bill. Most women in the
village take this patriarchal definition of their role for granted, as Mrs. Dunbar's and Mrs.
Delacroix's references to their husbands as their "old [men]" suggests. Tessie is the only one
who rebels against male domination, although only unconsciously.
On its surface, the idea of a lottery in which everyone, as Mrs. Graves says, "[takes] the same
chance" seems democratic, even if its effect, the singling out of one person for privilege or
attack, is not. The lottery suggests 'election' rather than selection," since "the [villagers]
gather in the center of the place, in the village square. In the lottery, the village ruling class
participates in order to convince others (and perhaps even themselves) that they are not in
fact above everyone else during the remainder of the year, even though their exclusive control
of the lottery suggests that they are. Yet just as the lottery's black (ballot?) box has grown
shabby and old and reveals its "original wood color," moments in their official "democratic"
conduct of the lottery--especially Mr. Summers' conduct as their representative--reveal the
class interest that lies behind it. Mr Summers wears jeans, as if he was just another one of
the common people, but he also wears a "clean white shirt," which is more appropriate to his
class. He leans casually on the black box before the lottery selection begins and talk[s]
interminably to Mr. Graves and Martins," the other members of his class, and "seem[s] very
proper and important". He asks for help in conducting the lottery "some of you fellows want to
give me a hand?", which seems to be a democratic request but in Summers' question is

actually an empty and formal one, since the villagers seem to unconsciously understand the
unspoken rule of class that determines who administers the lottery; it is not just anyone who
can help Summers. Mr. Martin, who responds, is the third most powerful man in the village.
The lottery's democratic illusion is an ideology that prevents the villagers from criticizing the
class structure of their society. The lottery also reinforces the village work ethic which
distracts the villagers' attention from the division of labor that keeps women powerless in their
homes and Mr. Summers powerful in his coal company office.
In the story, Old Man Warner recalls an old village adage, "Lottery in June, corn be heavy
soon". At one level, the lottery seems to be a modern version of a planting ritual that might
once have prepared the villagers for the collective work necessary to produce a harvest.
(Such rituals do not necessarily involve human sacrifice.) It establishes an unspoken
connection between the lottery and work that is revealed by his response when told that other
villages are considering doing away with the lottery: "Pack of crazy fools . . . listening to
young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go
back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying
about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed
chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery."
But Warner does not explain how the lottery motivates work. In order to do so, it would have
to inspire the villagers the fear that lack of productivity would make them vulnerable to
selection in the next lottery. The village women reveal such an unconscious fear in their
questions after the last slip has been drawn in the first round: "Who is it?" "Who's got it"" "Is it
the Dunbars?" "Is it the Watsons?" The Dunbars and the Watsons, are the least "productive"
families in the village: Mr. Dunbar has broken his leg, Mr. Watson is dead. We can then
understand why Old Man Warner' is so proud that he is participating in the lottery for the
"seventy-seventh time" - seventy-seven is a magical number - and his commitment to work
and the village work ethic accounts for his survival.
Old Man Warner's commitment to a work ethic is not entirely innocent since it encourages
villagers to work without questioning that part of their labor goes to the support of the leisure
and power of a business class. Warner is Summers' ideologist. He goes on to lament
Summers' democratic conduct: "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with
everybody", which obscures the fact that Summers won't undermine the lottery, even if he
does "modernize" it, since by running the lottery he also encourages a work ethic which
serves his interest. Just before the first round drawing, Summers remarks casually, "Well,
now . . guess we better get started, get this over with, so's we can go back to work". What
he means to say is "so that you can go back to work for me."
Why did Jackson make Tessie Hutchinson the lottery's victim/scapegoat? She could have
chosen anyone else to show us the unconscious connection that the villagers make between
the lottery and their work ethic. It is because Tessie is a woman whose role as a housewife
deprives her of her freedom by forcing her to submit to a husband who gains his power over
her by virtue of his place in the work force. Tessie, however, rebels against her role, and such
rebellion is just what the orderly functioning of her society cannot stand.
Tessie's rebellion begins with her late arrival at the lottery, a mistake that raises suspicions of
her resistance to everything that the lottery stands for. She explains to Mr. Summers that she
was doing her dishes and forgot what day it was. The way in which she says this suggests
that she might have violated the village's work ethic and neglected her specific job within the
village's social division of labor: "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you
Joe?" The "soft laughter [that runs] through the crowd" after this remark is a nervous laughter
that shows the extent of the village's commitment to its work ethic and power structure. When
Mr. Summers calls her family's name, Tessie goads her husband, "Get up there Bill". In doing
so, she inverts the power relation that holds in the village between husbands and wives.
Again, her remark evokes nervous laughter from the crowd, which sense the taboo that she
has violated. Her final mistake is to question the rules of the lottery in which women have an
inferior status to their husbands. When Mr. Summers asks Bill Hutchinson whether his family

has any other households, Tessie yells, "There's Don and Eva . . . Make them take their
chance". Tessie's daughter Eva, however, belongs to Don and is consequently barred from
participating with her parents' family. These mistakes foreshadow Tessie's being the
lottery's likeliest victim. Tessie's rebellion is entirely unconscious as revealed by her cry while
being stoned, "It isn't fair". Tessie does not object to the lottery per se, only to her own
selection as its scapegoat. It would have been fine with her if someone else had been
selected. In stoning Tessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat onto which they can project
their own urge to rebel. The only other places we can see these rebellious impulses are in
Tessie, in Mr. and Mrs. Adams' suggestion, squelched by Warner, that the lottery might be
given up, and in the laughter of the crowd. The crowd's nervous laughter expresses
uncertainty about the validity of the taboos that Tessie breaks. But ultimately these rebellious
impulses are channeled by the lottery and its ideology, capitalism, into anger at the rebellious
victims of capitalist social organization. Like Tessie, the villagers cannot express their
rebellion because the massive force of ideology stands in the way.
The lottery functions to terrorize the village into accepting, in the name of work and
democracy, the unequal social division of labor and power on its social order. When Tessie is
selected, and before she is stoned, Mr. Summers asks her husband to "show [the people] her
paper". By holding up the slip, Bill Hutchinson reasserts his dominance over his wife and
transforms her into a symbol of the dangers of disobedience. Tessie is a strange kind of
scapegoat, since the village does not literally choose her, single her out. An act of
scapegoating that is unmotivated is difficult to conceive. However, the lottery is a metaphor
for the unconscious ideological mechanisms of scapegoating. In choosing Tessie through the
lottery, Jackson has attempted to show us whom the village might have chosen if the lottery
had been an election. By presenting this election as an arbitrary lottery, she gives us an
image of the village's blindness to its own motives.
Even the village children have been socialized into the ideology that victimizes Tessie. When
they are introduced in the second paragraph of the story, they are anxious that summer has
let them out of school: "The feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them" (p. 291). Like their
parents, they have learned that leisure and play are suspect. As if to stop this anxiety, the
village boys start to collect stones for the lottery. (Is this play or labor?) Moreover, they follow
the lead of Bobby Martin, the one boy in the story whose father is a member of the village
ruling class (Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves have no boys), in hoarding and fighting over these
stones as if they were money. While the boys do this, the village girls stand off to the side
and watch, just as they will be expected to remain outside of the work force and dependent on
their working husbands when they grow up. "The children assembled first, of course" is not
meant to imply that children take a "natural" and primitive joy in stoning people to death. The
closer we look at their behavior, the more we realize that they learned it from their parents,
whom they copy in their play. But there is one genuinely innocent child in the story, Davy
Hutchinson. When he has to choose his lottery ticket, the adults help him while he looks at
them "wonderingly". And when Tessie is finally to be stoned, "someone" has to "[give] Davy
Hutchinson a few pebbles" to stone his mother. The village makes sure that Davy learns what
he is supposed to do before he understands why he does it or the consequences .
Even the village adults are not hopeless. Before Old Man Warner cuts them off, Mr. and Mrs.
Adams, whose last name suggests a humanity that has not been entirely lost, briefly mention
other villages that are either talking of giving up the lottery or have already done so. Probably
out of fear, they do not suggest that their village give it up; but hinting at the possibility may
indicate a reservation, a vague sense of guilt, about what they are about to do.The Adams's
represent the village's best humane impulses, which are repressed by the lottery.
The story is a criticism of social order and capitalism. The lottery is ironic since the "winner"
will be killed. It points out the failure of the capitalist ideology freedom, prosperity and
fulfillment and highlights the inequality between the genders. Jackson's story tends to be a
pessimistic look at man's innate depravity.