The Lottery and Other Stories

"The Lottery," one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in "The" "New Yorker," "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery: " with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jack son's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

Introduction

by Patrick McGrath

Displacement is perhaps the most persistent theme in the work of Shirley Jackson. In several stories in this collection the displacement is literal. "Like Mother Used to Make" tells of a hapless young man called David, who prepares dinner for the girl who lives in the apartment down the hall. She is the robust Marcia.  She bursts into David's apartment--much neatter and more tasteful than her own--and eats the dinner he's made. Then a Mr. Harris--"a very large man"--comes calling for Marcia. He is invited into David's apartment. He settles down with Marcia on the couch while David washes the dishes. A little later David finds himself somehow taking his leave of the couple and going to Marcia's apartment. "It was cold, it was dirty, and as he thought miserably of his own warm home he heard faintly down the hall the sound of laughter--." He has been quite literally displaced; and the queer thing is, he accepts it. He recognizes that his own nice apartment should be occupied by Marcia and Mr. Harris rather than by himself.

It's a simple tale, told in a few pages, but it illustrates a complicated truth about human nature, which is that we tend to assume the identity, more or less voluntarily, which others impose upon us. In her relentless exploration of this and associated ideas, Shirley Jackson at times resorted to wonderfully macabre imagery. In "Pillar of Salt" a New Hampshire woman on holiday with her husband in New York begins to go a little mad. This is not unusual in Shirley Jackson's work, where New York City is often depicted as a place quite capable of unhinging the vulnerable mind just by being itself. The couple spends a weekend on Long Island, where they come upon a human leg on the beach. It's a nice touch, for it deftly underscores the idea that for this woman everything is coming apart. And it is a form of displacement, too: human legs, severed at thigh and ankle, do not belong on sandy beaches. They should be attached, rather, to human torsos and have feet.

Emotional displacement, however--that is, the projection of emotion, usually negative, onto a weak and innocent victim--drives the best of these stories. The scapegoat, in its first biblical incarnation, was a creature sent into the wilderness with the sins of the people symbolically heaped upon its head. Shirley Jackson returns again and again to the figure of the human scapegoat, often a young woman who comes as an outsider to a rural community, where she discovers cruelty and hypocrisy seething below the surface of apparently tranquil social waters. "The Renegade" is just such a story. The Walpoles are city folk who have recently moved to a country town. One morning Mr. Walpole gets a phone call to say that the family dog, Lady, has been killing the neighbor's chickens.

Shirley Jackson has some rare sport with this. In the process she demonstrates just how poisonously vindictive small-town life can be. Mrs. Walpole is torn, of course, between her desire on the one hand to placate her neighbor and by extension the townspeople--all of whom want her chicken-killing dog destroyed---and on the other, to defend the honor of Lady. She seeks a compromise, but it's not forthcoming. Nice Mrs. Nash next door, cooking doughnuts, comfortably tells her that "'once they get the taste of blood...they'd rather kill than eat!'" Then old Mr. White, sitting on his porch, cheerfully calls out to her as she passes, "'Guess you're not going to have any more dog!'" The only solution, it seems, short of shooting the dog, is to tie a dead chicken around it's neck. The idea is, that as the chicken rots the dog becomes so sick of chicken it's cured of its bad habit. Various other revolting possibilities are outlined to Mrs. Walpole; but the worst of it is when her children come home for lunch, talking just as sadistically about poor Lady's fate as the rest of the town. "Everything was quiet and lovely in the sunlight, the peaceful sky, the gentle line of the hills. Mrs. Walpole closed her eyes suddenly feeling the harsh hands pulling her down--."

These last words of the story express the predicament of many of Shirley Jackson's scapegoats. In an orderly, pleasant, peaceful world, suddenly a crack opens, there's a tear in the surface--and what is revealed beneath is ugly, primitive, barbaric, violent. The tone of "The Renegade" is darkly humorous, as the people around Mrs. Walpole try to outdo one another in the ghastliness of the methods they can dream up to "cure" her dog of its chicken-killing tendencies. But in others of the stories the mood is altogether more serious, the target more morally fraught than the grim relish with which country people devise ways of torturing a newcomer's dog.

Racism, most pernicious of all form of emotional displacement, is the subject of several of these stories. Often the approach is subtle and oblique, as in the creepy few pages of  "A Fine Old Firm" where the aptly named Mrs. Concord puts a Jewish woman firmly in her place. Or "After You, My Dear Alphonse," where no mention of ethnicity is required to identify the patronizing and stereotyping tendency of a certain sort of well-meaning liberal mind. But it is in "Flower Garden" that Shirley Jackson harnesses the ugliness of racism with the hypocrisy of small-town life to most telling and chilling effect.



The structure of "Flower Garden" is more complex than that of the other stories in the collection, with perhaps the exception of "Elizabeth," the longest of the New York stories. In both stories there is a kind of double scapegoating in the course of adaptation to a new community, a woman--and Shirley Jackson's victims are invariably women, with the exception of limp David and the dog called Lady--undergoes a certain oppressive socialization into the rigid mores of that community. She becomes in her turn the instrument of oppression of a newer, weaker arrival, growing harder and crueler while consolidating her own position. And so the world goes round.

"Flower Garden" is about two such women: the newcomer, a widow with a small boy, and her new friend, a young woman who has married into an old-established local family but is not as yet secure. But when the young widow employs a "colored man" as her gardener, and permits her boy to play with his boy, the town is scandalized.  Tongues wag, but nothing is actually said to the widow. She is quite naturally bewildered by people's sudden coldness toward her; but when she asks her friend what is happening, her friend pretends nothing is amiss and withdraws into chilly solidarity with the rest: she cannot risk her own position by being honest, or indeed by displaying my human decency at all toward her friend. It is in just this way, Shirley Jackson seems to be saying to us, that society transmits those blind narrow rigid conventions and prejudices that bedevil human connectedness and divide people one from another.

"The Lottery" is the most vivid and terrifying expression of this idea in all of Shirley Jackson's work; which is why, of course, it is so famous. And its capacity to shock is as potent today as when the story first appeared more than fifty years ago. It is as though Shirley Jackson had done enough to document in her fiction the primal human tendency to channel a community's aggression against a chosen victim, that is, to scapegoat. Recognizing the proclivity to ritualize the deep impulses of our nature, she imagined a ritualized scapegoating, one violent enough effectively to draw off all the aggression bottled up over a twelve-month period in a community sustaining an appearance of placidity and well-being: that community being, as in so many of these stories, a small town in New England. The genius of the story lies in an apparent excess. For it was Shirley Jackson's realization that the sum of a year's worth of a small town's cruelty, anger, and hypocrisy, when converted to direct physical expression, would be more than adequate to fuel a human sacrifice, with the entire community--men, women, and children--participating in the event. That is what it takes, she seems to say, to keep our towns pleasant and peaceful. That is the price we pay. And none of us is innocent in this regard, not even the children.

It was a message that outraged readers of the story when it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. We are more familiar now, of course, with the warning that we repress emotion at out peril, both as individuals and as a society. But Shirley Jackson understood the cost of maintaining the false facade before that insight was commonplace. She gave it fictional flesh in a large body of work, and in particular in a short story of such succinct compressed power that it cannot be read today without a shudder of horror and recognition; and no one who reads it ever forgets it.

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Excerpted from The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
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