This is Shirley Jackson, writer of unsettling stories
and self-proclaimed ‘practicing amateur witch’. You might be familiar with her from the Netflix
series 'The Haunting of Hill House' which takes its title and general haunted house
premise from her novel of the same name, and which utterly distressed and petrified
me, so much so that I had to have significant, month-long breaks between episodes. You might
have watched Elizabeth Moss portray her in the 2020 biopic, ‘Shirley’. You might have read
this, her fantastic, dark, magical novel, 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. Or perhaps you know her from this,
'The Lottery and Other Stories'. This is, as you might have guessed, a collection
of short stories, and of these stories, this one, ‘The Lottery’, is probably the one you’ve heard
of. It’s a very unsettling tale about a disturbing and largely unquestioned tradition, upheld by a
small, close-knit community. But is it the most unsettling story in the collection? I’m going
to give you a lowdown of ‘The Lottery’ before delving into a different story from this book, the
one that left me more startled and disturbed than I have been in quite some time. Before we get into that, hi, welcome to the video, if you’re new here I’m Dr Rosie Whitcombe
and this lovely creature is Mouse the cat, and we make videos on all things literary,
so please subscribe if that’s your jam. So, ‘The Lottery’. The publication of this
disturbing short story in The New Yorker in 1948 caused somewhat of an outcry. According
to Jackson’s biographer, Ruth Franklin, Jackson received letters for the rest of her life
that demanded an explanation for ‘The Lottery’: "What was this story about?" "What did it
mean?" "Why did it leave me feeling icky?" People wrote to The New Yorker expressing their
disgust and displeasure, and some even canceled their subscriptions. According to Jackson,
one disgruntled reader wrote in and said Never has it been my lot to read so cunningly
vicious a story as that published in your last issue for June. I tremble to think of
the fate of American letters if that piece indicated the taste of the editors of
a magazine I had considered distinguished. While Jackson suffered some abuse for ‘The
Lottery’, most people, according to Franklin, seemed to just be confused by the story;
they didn’t know whether it was fiction or a report of actual events. In an article
about the public response to ‘The Lottery’, Jackson described getting hundreds of
letters from people, many of whom wanted to know ‘where these lotteries were held,
and whether they could go there and watch’. Whether they understood ‘The Lottery’ to be
fiction or not, whether they thought it ‘cunningly viscous’ and inappropriate or not, the story
certainly struck a chord with the reading public, horrified and fascinated in equal part. Now,
it’s readily considered an American classic: it’s very well studied and very well known. But
what’s the big deal? What’s it actually about? ‘The Lottery’ is a disturbing account of
an ages-old tradition in a New England village. This tradition is referred to as ‘the
lottery’, it’s compulsory for all villagers, it works in two stages, and it essentially goes
something like this. Stage one: You arrive at a gathering in the village square. Everybody is
there, your family, all your neighbours. This gathering facilitates the lottery and is being
managed, chaired, if you will, by one man, Mr. Summers, who has a box filled with pieces of
folded up paper. Let’s say you’re the head of your family. You, alongside all the other men in your
position, step forward and pick a piece of paper at random - not all households are headed by men,
but most are. Now, of all these pieces of paper, one of them is marked with a black spot. You take
yours and unfold it. If it’s blank, great! If it’s marked, then you progress to the next stage. Stage
two: You’re invited forward to choose another bit of folded up paper, but this time, your family
accompanies you, and you each choose a piece of paper, and again, one of them will be marked
with a black spot. If yours is blank, great! If it’s marked, you’re publicly stoned by the rest of
the villagers. To death? We don’t know. After Mrs. Hutchinson
reveals her marked piece of paper, Jackson ends the story with the chilling line: “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson
screamed, and then they were upon her. We’re left to speculate, to sit in this
uncomfortable reality in which Mrs. Hutchinson might have suffered a brutal death; and we have
to sit with the fact that this is something that happens, we’re told, on a yearly basis. More than
this, the lottery isn’t exclusive to this village, and we don’t know exactly how widespread a custom
it is. Now, there are murmurs of other villages nearby ending the practice; but the elders
in this village dismiss that as nonsense. “They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner,
who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”
Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “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,
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,” he added petulantly. So first up, we can see that superstition plays
a significant part in the story. The lottery is, in essence, a ritual sacrifice. You never
find out why the villagers insist on running the lottery each year. But you learn
about these rumours and odd beliefs, like ‘stone someone to death and you’ll have a
good harvest’, that have no logical explanation. Another unsettling thing about the
story is that, it would appear, every villager partakes in the stoning -
including, we can assume, the family members of the person who wins the lottery. This year, the
unfortunate lot falls to Mrs. Tessie Hutchinson. Now, it’s worth remembering that, in Stage
Two, each member of the Hutchinson family has to choose a paper, including a child so young
they need an adult to help them choose and unfold their paper. This is dark on many levels, not
least that it implies the bigger your family, the less chance you have of being chosen.
Fit into the nuclear family culture? You’re less likely to be stoned by your community.
Live alone, have few family ties, and choose not to have children? If you choose the black
spot in Stage One, there won’t be a Stage Two. The Hutchinsons though don’t have this problem,
they’re a pretty big family, two parents and three kids take part; but the way they react to
the situation is no less dark and disturbing. Poor Tessie, it’s creepy how her husband
and children react when they aren’t chosen, when they open their papers and find them blank.
When her two older children discover they’re safe, they ‘beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd
and holding their slips of paper above their heads’. They play to the crowd and delight
in their luck, showing no sorrow or distress over the fact that it’s gonna be one of their parents
- Bill or Tessie - who will have the black spot. It’s a great story, and one that leaves this
heaviness in my heart because it’s so short and so sadistic and such a fascinating commentary
on mob culture and the perils of tradition. These are ordinary people, like you and me,
talking, as they stand waiting in the crowd, about getting back to work or doing the washing
up or raising their families. They’re not detached loony cultists - they’re our friends, our
neighbours; they’re us. It’s very interesting to me that so many of the people who wrote into The
New Yorker, and to Jackson, expressed, above all, confusion over what the story meant, and I wonder
what that says about 1940s America and the kind of demographic that were reading The New Yorker
at that time. Franklin offers the following take: [‘The Lottery’] anticipates the way we would
come to understand the twentieth century’s unique lessons about the capacity of ordinary
citizens to do evil—from the Nazi camp bureaucracy to the Communist societies that depended on the
betrayal of neighbor by neighbor [...] In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War
barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first
readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they
did not realize exactly what they were looking at. I find that so fascinating - and it’s a reminder
to me of how easy it is to forget about historical context when reading a text
from my own contemporary perspective; like part of me is sitting here thinking ‘how
is the message of this story not obvious?’ but it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people, and
is still the subject of debate. This is one thing I adore about studying literature;
the variety of different interpretations, and how wildly those interpretations can
change depending on history, circumstance, and context. What do you think? Do you agree
that ‘The Lottery’ is a commentary on the dangers of tradition? Or do you have a completely
different interpretation? Let me know in the comments. One final thing I want to mention about ‘The
Lottery’: it’s an interesting take on witches and witch trials of days gone by, and it’s
apt that the punishment falls to Tessie, Mrs. Hutchinson, an older woman, the
demographic more likely to be tortured and murdered for “being witches” back in the
day. You get a sense of the ageism involved when Nancy Hutchinson, Tessie’s 12 year
old daughter, chooses her piece of paper: 'The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of
the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.' Everybody hears this; no one contradicts it. This
sense of hoping it’s not one person suggests that by default you kind of hope it’s one of
the others, which is uncomfortable enough; but there’s also this grim undercurrent that,
of the mother and daughter, nobody really cares too much about the mother. She’s portrayed
as a bit outspoken, maybe a bit of a nag, earlier in the story - which again plays
back into the witchcraft theme, and the I got better ‘The lottery’ is up to its elbows in witchery.
But so too is an even shorter and, in my opinion, even more disturbing story from the collection,
simply and aptly titled, ‘The Witch’. If you’ve heard of all of these, and better yet, if you’ve
read them, you’re less likely to have come across ‘The Witch’. In this edition, it spans only 5
pages, it can literally get lost if you flip through too quickly. And this almost adds to its
unsettling, uncanny, tenor; it’s there, lurking, and if you’re not careful you might just miss it. 'The coach was so nearly empty that the little boy had a seat all to himself, and his mother
sat across the aisle on the seat next to the little boy’s sister, a baby with a piece of
toast in one hand and a rattle in the other.' So the story begins. The little boy, introduced
to us here, is at that age where he’s asking lots of questions and commenting excitedly on
everything they pass as the train shunts along. His mother is reading quietly, tending
to the baby every now and then, and answering his ‘questions without looking up’: '“There’s a cow,” he would say, or,
sighing, “How far do we have to go?” “Not much longer now,” his mother said, each time.' The little boy goes to soothe his
baby sister as she starts to cry, and his mother gives him a lollipop. He
returns to his window, looks out, and says: '“I saw a witch,” [...]
“There was a big old ugly witch outside and I told her to go away
and she went away,” the little boy went on, in a quiet narrative to himself, “she came and
said, ‘I’m going to eat you up,’ and I said, ‘no, you’re not,’ and I chased
her away, the bad old mean witch.”' Then, into the carriage comes a man; ‘an
elderly man, with a pleasant face under white hair’. He says hello to the little boy,
and they strike up a pleasant conversation. The man asks the boy what he’s looking at
out the window; the boy tells him witches. The man asks how old the boy is; the boy says
‘Twenty-six. Eight hundred and forty eighty’. His mother looks up from her book, ‘“Four,” she
said smiling fondly at the little boy’. This kind of playful question and answer continues. The
little boy says ‘“That’s my sister over there”’, referencing, of course, his baby
sister. And then, we get this: '“Do you love your sister?” the
man asked. The little boy stared, and the man came around the side of the
seat and sat down next to the little boy. “Listen,” the man said, “shall
I tell you about my little sister?” The mother, who had looked up anxiously when
the man sat down next to her child, goes peacefully back to her book. “Tell me about your
sister,” the little boy said. “Was she a witch?” “Maybe,” the man said [...] “Once upon a
time,” he began, “I had a little sister, just like yours.” The little boy looked up at the
man, nodding at every word. “My little sister,” the man went on, “was so pretty and so nice
that I loved her more than anything else in the world. So shall I tell you what I did?”
The little boy nodded more vehemently, and the mother lifted her eyes from
her book and smiled, listening. “I bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a
million lollipops,” the man said, “and then I took her and I put my hands around her neck
and I pinched her and I pinched her until she was dead.” The little boy gasped and the mother
turned around, her smile fading. She opened her mouth, and then closed it again
as the man went on, “And then I took and I cut her head off and I took her head—” “Did you cut her all in pieces?”
the little boy asked breathlessly. “I cut off her head and her hands and her feet and her hair and her nose,” the man said,
“and I hit her with a stick and I killed her.”' *Exhale* Who saw that coming? Let’s just- let's take a breather there,
shall we? I’d really love to know what you think of this exchange, what we might call the turning
point of the story. For me, I remember when I first read it, it really took me aback; I wasn’t
expecting something so sudden and explicit and gruesome at all. It’s an amazingly powerful shift,
I think, done incredibly well, that’s captivating and horrifying and leaves me feeling fully
disturbed; and this is, I want to emphasise again, only a five page long short story - it may
be small but it packs a punch. Let me know in the comments what you think - did the man’s
revelation catch you off guard? Could you see it coming? And if you want more content of this
ilk please subscribe and give this video a like. So, where to begin in terms of analysis.
I mean, we’ve already touched on the suddenness of this revelation. It makes you
sit up, sets you right on edge. What the f*** is this random man saying to this four year
old child? We barely have time to conjecture whether he’s telling the truth or wonder
who he is; he just carries on with his tale, in this uncomfortable child-like manner - note
the way he talks, it’s very similar to how the little boy was talking at the beginning, “I cut off her head and her hands and her feet and he hair and her nose [...] and I hit
her with a stick and I killed her”.' Sort of semi-nonsensical stream of consciousness, “and
I did this and I did that”, which in a child is endearing but in this strange man who might
have killed his baby sister, is terrifying. The little boy’s response, too,
is alarming: he’s captivated, not scared. What the man says fits, almost
seamlessly, into the boy’s narrative of make believe. So we’ve got this disturbing
overlap between childlike imagination and the real potential of child torture, mutilation, and
murder. And this is another thing, the man doesn’t just talk about how he killed his sister, but how
he violated her body in the way he cut it up. Now, we might decide this man is suffering from some
form of mental illness and none of this is true; afterall, he says he kills her in three
different ways, only one can be true. But I don’t think this story is really posing a
question of truth; it’s more a question of why is this man saying this, true or not, to
a little boy? And what is the effect of that? The mother is shocked; shocked enough
she doesn’t know how to respond at first, but then interjects as the man continues
describing more and more grotesque scenarios: 'She stood next to the man and said, “Just what
do you think you’re doing?” The man looked up courteously and she said, “Get out of here.”' To me, this is a really creepy exchange because
what she says to him, to this elderly man, buys into the strange childlike persona he’s adopted.
You know, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”, to my mind, is a phrase, or a way
of phrasing that kind of question, that an adult wouldn’t say to another adult;
it’s the way an adult would chastise a child, it’s finger-wagging. Though she’s intervening,
she’s also sucked into this bizarre reality the man has created, fitting into the role of mother.
And the man’s response is equally disturbing: '“Did I frighten you?” the man said. He looked down at the little boy and nudged him with an
elbow and he and the little boy laughed.' This really speaks to me of how easily
young children can be manipulated or groomed by adults. The little boy
is on the man’s side, it would seem; not only is he not terrified, but
he’s formed a kinship with this man, over his gruesome anecdotes. They’ve
teamed up and turned against the mother, as though she’s the crazy one for being
frightened, and being frightened is laughable. '“I can very easily call the
conductor,” the mother said to the man. “The conductor will eat my mommy,” the
little boy said. “We’ll chop her head off.” “And little sister’s head, too,” the man said.' The little boy is so enraptured he’s parroting the
violent narrative, and again, it fits in with what he was saying earlier about the witch he saw out
the window who threatened to eat him all up. Now, it’s at this point that the man gets up and
leaves, politely, excusing himself. As he exits the train car, the boy says, “My mommy will eat
you”, and he and the man laugh together again. Now this isn’t a horror story that ends with the
man coming back later and killing the mother, or the boy killing his little sister;
the ending is much more uncomfortable, and much more nuanced and than that. The ending of this story is awkward;
it's stunned. It’s not a call to action, you know: the
mother doesn’t go and tell the conductor, and the boy doesn’t start behaving violently.
There’s just this uncomfortable pause in which the mother is trying to work out the best thing
to say, and she settles on “You sit still and be a good boy. You may have another lollipop.” And
like, yeah, what else can you say? What’s the right thing to do here? Do you ask if he’s ok? Do
you tell him off for interacting with the man? Do you reassure him? It’s unclear, and this makes the
whole thing even more upsetting: the encounter has enforced a confounded silence on the mother. In
any case, the boy is very excited to receive his second lollipop, and thanks his mother before
asking, “Did that man really cut his little sister up in pieces?” The mother insists the
man was just teasing, and the boy accepts this, goes back to his seat, and looks out the window.
“Prob’ly he was a witch.” The story closes. There’s no resolution here. The man leaves,
presumably free to terrorise other families. The mother doesn’t know how to talk to her
son about it. The little boy, true to form, seems to get over it quickly. He’s stimulated by
the thing in front of him, as children often are. But the fact he sort of brushes
it off is unsettling in itself; it’s almost like it didn’t happen. We’re
left questioning the whole exchange; one question being, was the man,
indeed, as the boy suggests, a witch? If, as we tend to assume, witches are women, this
is an interesting gender role reversal. We have the witch figure described at the beginning of
the story by the boy in the more traditional way: ‘the bald old mean witch’, who is female. By
the end we’re introduced to the possibility that an elderly man in a suit with a
kind face is the real witch of the story. Like in ‘The Lottery’, this role reversal serves
to highlight the normalcy of violent action. The most brutal traditions, the most terrifying
characters, aren’t dressed up as wicked witches: they’re your neighbours, your friends, your
family, the nice old man who sits next to you on the train. In Jackson, any sense of ‘normal’,
nice, polite, suburbanity - that is a word - is ripped right out of the ground; there is no safety
in ‘normal’, everyone has the potential for evil. We never get any answers. We never see an
end to the train journey. We never find out how much of what the man said, how much of what
the boy saw out the window, is true. The story’s simplistic structure and brevity mimics a child’s
bedtime story almost, and we get a strong sense of childlike narratives throughout, like when the
man begins his anecdote with ‘Once upon a time’. This story is so disturbing because it
directly addresses and magnifies child murder and manipulation with no consequence for the
murderer/manipulator. We’re left to reel in the myriad distressing possibilities Jackson presents
to us, with no clear means of resolution. But what do you think? Do you prefer ‘The
Lottery’? Or is there another Shirley Jackson short story or novel you think
is more frightening? Let me know below. Shirely Jackson staked out a reputation
for herself in the 20th century as a master of American Gothic fiction. If
you want to learn about the master of English Gothic fiction in the
18th century, click here next.
