'Perverted': how Shirley Jackson's The Lottery caused outrage across America
American horror writer Shirley Jackson is having a bit of a moment. The end of this month sees the UK release of Shirley – a biopic starring the Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss. And Jackson’s classic ghost story The Haunting of Hill House was given a recent fillip by a superbly spooky Netflix adaptation.
Yet what’s less well known is how she first rose to prominence. Jackson was right at the beginning of her career, and virtually unknown, when, in 1948, The New Yorker published her short story The Lottery. Overnight it made her famous – or, properly, infamous. You could think of it as the Cat Person of its day.
The Lottery is set in an unnamed New England town – modelled on Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson lived with her husband and children. As it opens, a holiday atmosphere is established: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full- summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” Everyone’s a bit excited about the lottery – an annual tradition that goes back as far as anyone can remember. This being a small town, the whole thing can be got over within less than two hours, we’re told, so everyone will get home for dinner. The children scamper and play. Little boys make a pile of stones. Mothers gossip. Fathers trade jokes and smiles.
When everyone’s assembled, the genial master of ceremonies produces a tatty old black box filled with slips of paper – it used to be wood chips, but times have changed – and the male heads of households take turns drawing out a slip.
As the process unfolds, we’re treated to little slices of smalltown chatter. Some nearby towns are even talking of abolishing the lottery, someone remarks.
“Pack of crazy fools,” says Old Man Warner. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves.”
This year, the Hutchinson family are the winners. Mrs Hutchinson complains that it’s unfair, but the townsfolk pay her little attention. A second draw takes place among the five members of the Hutchinson household – and Mrs Hutchinson comes up with the black spot.
At which point – spoiler alert – everyone grabs a rock and stones her to death. The whole thing is dispatched in not much more than 3,000 words.
The response to this clever little sliver of grand guignol was not entirely positive. It’s said to have been the most complained-about story in the history of The New Yorker.
Readers called it “gruesome”, “outrageous”, “perverted” and “utterly pointless”. Hundreds of subscriptions were cancelled, and the story was banned outright in South Africa. Jackson herself at one point was getting 12 letters a day forwarded from The New Yorker, barely a single one in favour: “Of the 300-odd letters that I received that summer,” she said later, “I can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends.”
Even her parents put pen to paper to complain. Jackson’s mother wrote to her to report: “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker. It does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?”
Jackson herself later remarked drily: “The number of people who expected Mrs Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.” She also joked: “People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.”
Over the years, the response to the story changed. But she identified in that initial wave of outrage what she called “a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence”. That’s apt. The story touched a nerve. Even in 1948, when the horrors of the Nazi regime were still fresh in the memory, the idea that such primitive evil could appear among modern, civilised people and not be recognised as such – that mass-murder, sanctioned by tradition, could be so domesticated as to be the sort of thing you’d look forward to getting over in time for dinner – had the power to shock.
Shirley Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin said the story “takes the classic theme of man’s inhumanity to man and gives it an additional twist: the randomness inherent in brutality”. And it has been seen by some as anticipating Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” in Eichmann In Jerusalem.
Yet others have complained that since the existence of the lottery is not explained or historicised, Jackson offers too pessimistic and casual or even flippant a view of a human default to sadism.
Well, your mileage may vary. The Lottery isn’t, after all, an earnest work of sociology but a short, sharp twist-in-the-tail horror story, and an excellent one at that. You can see in it the germ of much that was to become standard in the horror and sci-fi stories of the years to follow. The vibe looks sideways, perhaps, to the spooky stories of Ray Bradbury and backwards to the mythology of the Salem witch trials.
A lottery like this one is the central McGuffin of The Hunger Games. Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and Hereditary all have that same trick of establishing a community of gossipy locals who are later revealed to be something altogether awful. And Stephen King has practically made a career out of wholesome New England towns where something turns out to be Not Quite Right.
The lingering sting of the story’s set-up, though, resonates outside the literary world. Looking at the peculiar acts of cruelty we still see worldwide licensed by custom and tradition – at the violence that still gets committed in the name of religion – we would be fools to write it off as a period-piece.
Shirley will be released in cinemas on Oct 30