SACRED VIOLENCE IN SHIRLEY JACKSON'S THE LOTTERY

Headnote

Abstract: The jarring juxtapostion of a biblical stoning in a mid-20th century North American village in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" has baffled readers and led critics to numerous interpretations of the short story. This paper will briefly survey the range of criticism before applying René Girard's (1966) theory on violence, religion, and scapegoating to this tale of ritualized communal murder.

Key words: René Girard, Shirley Jackson, scapegoating, violence

1. Introduction

Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery (1949) is a text frequently read in American high schools and colleges, and one I myself have assigned many times to students in writing classes. Invariably, this text about a small North American community that comes together in late June every year to select one person, chosen by drawing lots in two stages, who is then ritually stoned by everyone else, provokes a strong reaction from students, much as it did upon its publication in 1948. At the time, the story sparked the largest number of responses from readers in the history of the New Yorker, the magazine that originally published it, with many outraged at the brutality it depicted and a few even requesting to know where the village was so that they could go visit it. The image of a peaceful, 20th century farming community employing the ancient, biblical-style punishment of stoning on a randomly chosen victim baffled many American readers, who were either unable to comprehend this juxtaposition or were offended by it.

This short story has also elicited a number of interpretations from literary critics and what I propose to do now is outline some of the responses before moving on to analyze the short story using René Girard's (1966) ideas on the relationship between violence and the sacred as a framework.

2. Critical interpretations

Randy Bobbitt (1994:8) identified three categories into which most interpretations of The Lottery may fall: it may be understood as a story about a) the power of traditions, b) an agricultural fertility ritual, or c) the tendency to scapegoat individuals. In the first case, the emphasis is usually placed on how the tradition of holding the lottery is perpetuated. For example, Old Man Warner stands in for the voice of the older generation who proclaim that what was once must always be - "always been a lottery!" the old man says loud enough for all to hear (Jackson 1949:215). He denounces anyone who would give up the lottery as "a pack of fools" who would lead the community back to pre-historic times. Indeed, Old Man Warner seems to even derive his sense of identity from having survived so many times. The placing of stones in Little Davy's hand so that he too has to participate can be seen as an element of perpetuating the lottery for future generations - not only are the young taught the rules of the game at an early age but now there is no way he can later back out of the tradition and claim that others had killed his mother, for he too had joined in. The role of ritual is also mentioned as a way for individuals to distance themselves from any personal responsibility in the killing.

Old Man Warner plays the main role in discussions of the lottery as an ancient fertility rite. It is he who reminds everyone of the saying "Lottery in June, com be heavy soon" (215), thus suggesting that, for whatever reason people do it now, the original purpose of the lottery was a sacrifice for a good harvest.

The scapegoating line of interpretation associates the stoning of a victim with the ancient Hebrew tradition of choosing a scapegoat to carry off the sins of the community at large and is often seen as a statement about man's inhumanity to man. Brooks and Warren (1971:74), for instance, cite the story as a tale about the "all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat", while others go back to Jackson's own statement about the story shortly after publication that "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" (qtd. in Kosenko 1985:27).

It should be noted that many of these categories overlap and, in choosing a particular critical approach, critics will often draw on elements of more than one of them. In a feminist interpretation, for example, the choice of a housewife as the scapegoat is invariably emphasized and attention is drawn to the similarity of the victim's name, Tessie Hutchinson, with the New England Puritan rebel Anne Hutchinson, who fought against the tradition of male authority in spiritual matters. Fritz Oehlschlaeger (1988:259) sees the ritual as "a patriarchal society's way of controlling female sexuality" and focuses on the dominant position of men both in the village life and in organizing the lottery every year, as proof that the tradition is a masculine one. He also sees a pattem of female resistance to the lottery, especially in Mrs Adams being the only one to outright question the continuation of the lottery.

In a Marxist reading of the story, Peter Kosenko (1985:31) also identifies the male-dominated power structure in the village, but sees the tradition as a mechanism "to reinforce an inequitable social division of labor". In Kosenko's view, the choice of Tessie Hutchinson as the scapegoat is linked to her late appearance at the ceremony and her death then understood by the villagers as punishment for her failure to adhere to the community's work ethic. The winners in all this are the village's business elite, Mr Summers, who owns the coal company, and Mr Graves, the postmaster, who both, as Kosenko points out, also organize and control the lottery.

What these feminist and Marxist interpretations share is an understanding of the ritual as a means of social control - albeit serving slightly different interests - and the belief that the choice of the scapegoat is not entirely coincidental. While the process of selecting a victim does certainly reflect social power relations - first, a family is selected with only the eldest male entitled to draw, with women assigned to the male households they marry into - the fact that the victim chosen is the appropriate one to the specific purpose appears at odds with the fact that everyone in the village takes part and draws a slip of paper. At this stage, critics are often grasping at straws to explain how the "correct" victim is chosen, with Oehlschlaeger (1988:264), for instance, arguing that a male victim could be chosen since "the lottery must appear to be fair" but ultimately claiming that the selection process must be somehow unfair, as Tessie states, and that "it is reasonable to assume that its lack of fairness would be evident only to the victim". Similarly, Kosenko (1985:32) suggests that the lottery method used in order to choose the scapegoat is meant to give the appearance of f democratic legitimacy to the outcome, but falls back in the end on a convoluted claim that the lottery is a metaphor for "the unconscious ideological mechanisms of scapegoating" and that "an arbitrary lottery [...] is an image of the village's blindness to its own motives". Other critics have examined the mathematically possible outcomes of the two-stage process of the lottery in order to assess whether it is truly fair or not, and Joseph Church (1988:11) contends that Jackson's choice of verbs connected to the act of drawing a paper - everyone in the village "takes" a slip of paper, except the town's elite, Summers, Martin, and Graves, who "select" a paper - is evidence that the lottery is rigged. And yet there is a way to account for the arbitrariness of the lottery without relying on verbal gymnastics, namely, René Girard's (1966) theory on scapegoating and religion, and its requirement of choosing an arbitrary victim.

3. A Girardian interpretation

It should be noted that this is not the first attempt to apply Girard's ideas to Jackson's text. John Lamerson (2010:26) has seen Girard's theory as explaining why the village chooses an innocent victim once a year as a human sacrifice - it is a way to "release pent aggression" that would otherwise boil over into infighting and rivalries. This ritualized violence allows the villagers to live in peace for the rest of the year, and explains why there is no mention in the text of "jails, criminals, or prisons", "police force or sheriff'.

Unfortunately, Lamerson's (2010:25) application of Girard's theory to the story is very brief, and while he is correct when stating that "Girard demonstrates that a societal need to restore harmony within a community requires violence against an innocent individual, and it requires the violence to be performed in a ritualized/religious format", he incorrectly identifies what Girard claims is the trigger for ritualized violence. It is not that "a lack of natural resources necessarily leads to a desire for violence" (ibid.), but an even more fundamental aspect of human psychology that incites violence - it is what Girard has termed "mimetic desire". Here, a somewhat deeper analysis of Girard's ideas will help provide clues for understanding Jackson's text.

Girard (1977:81-86) conceives of violence as playing a generative role in the creation of human culture and religion. Violence, of course, can be a terribly destructive element, but if practiced in a smaller dose, it can prevent the later outbreak of larger scale violence that would destroy everyone. He theorizes an original murder in human civilizations, the killing of a surrogate victim, after which violence stops and the community gains the benefits of peace. To regain the effect, the practice is turned into a ritual and a ritual victim is chosen on a regular basis and sacrificed. In some cases, the victim is an animal, in others - a human being.

Central to this idea is the concept of mimetic desire, a theory Girard (1966:24) developed as a literary critic before moving on to apply the idea to the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religion. Moving a step beyond Aristotle's definition of mimesis, which focuses on representations of reality or human thought that produce, for example, art or language, Girard proposes mimesis as a central motivating factor for human behaviour. An individual desires an object not because of its intrinsic value but rather because it is desired by another individual. The theory of mimetic desire thus provides a simple explanation for social phenomena such as fashion and explains a central impulse behind the human drive to create social or cultural groups. Children growing up in any group instinctively imitate the behaviour they see around them and desire those objects that they see others around them already desire, and so common values and attitudes arise. However, since some objects are necessarily limited in number, mimetic desire will also necessarily give rise to rivalries and conflicts. Mimetic desire thus produces both a gravitational and a centrifugal effect that a culture needs to regulate or risk its own destruction.

The central mechanism that Girard identifies for avoiding what he terms a mimetic crisis is the scapegoat effect. Cultural order is based on a series of social distinctions that are designed to apportion who gets what in terms of material goods or marriage partners, for example, and thus prevent mimetic desire for coming to a head. From time to time, however, this system will break down, leading to a mimetic crisis where the signs are first a loss of distinction and then an outbreak of rivalries that threatens to engulf the society in a cycle of reciprocal violence as each individual or group claims what it believes is its due. Stability is restored through common agreement on violence against a particular individual or group, in other words, through the selection of a scapegoat. Thus the society's loss of unanimity brought about by mimetic rivalry is cured at the expense of a victim to establish a new "unanimity-minus-one" (Girard 1977:259).

In primitive and pre-Christian societies, Girard suggests, selecting a victim occurs as an almost unconscious process so that members of a group do not understand exactly what has happened; they only see that the death of the victim has miraculously lead to an end to violence and resulted in peace and order in their culture. This leads to the sacralization of the victim, to whom magical powers are attributed, and the scapegoat is transformed into a saviour after his death. Thus, the scapegoat mechanism, Girard maintains, is the central principle underlying the function of all religions and a driving force behind the creation of culture. He compares and analyzes Greek mythology as well as religious and cultural practices from Scandinavia, Africa, South and Central America, and the Pacific Islands to come to this conclusion.

Practically, all the elements of Girard's theory can be found in The Lottery, which portrays a ceremony that can be understood as a ritualistic reenactment of an original murder upon which the village was founded. The mechanism of the lottery allows for the selection of an arbitrary victim whose innocence or guilt is totally unimportant to the process. What appears at first to be random violence both is and is not random. A victim is chosen arbitrarily, but this arbitrariness is, in fact, planned and necessary to prevent a greater future violence. The ritual itself and all its paraphernalia - the black box, the three-legged stool, the toneless chant - harken back to the original ceremony and allow the villagers to contain the unfettered violence that would break out if they did not carry out the lottery. The question of fairness, then, that Tessie so bitterly raises is not coincidental at all; for the lottery to be efficacious, everyone must take the same chance and must believe in the fairness of the selection process and its ultimately arbitrary outcome.

Of course, the parallels with Girard's theory on violence and religion are not one to one. Girard (1977:102) contends that "the surrogate (or original) victim comes from inside the community and the ritual victim must come from outside, otherwise the community would find it difficult to unite against it", yet in the lottery, it is always a member of the community, in this case Tessie, who stands in as a ritual victim. This discrepancy, however, can be explained by the effectiveness of the lottery's rules: the villagers have come up with a method that allows for the totally random selection of a victim, a method that if they all accept as legitimate and fair absolves all individuals from any responsibility for the choice made, and, of course, the killing itself. In the end, the "unanimity minus one" is achieved even when choosing a victim from inside the community, and everyone, including Mr. Adams, who had earlier been the first to talk of other villages rejecting the lottery, joins in to throw stones on Mrs. Hutchinson.

Another aspect of Girard's analysis worth exploring briefly is the presence of mimetic desire in the text, for its presence would be the sign of an impending social or sacrificial crisis that could potentially unleash reciprocal violence in this otherwise seemingly peaceful village. However, mimetic desire - the triangle of one person desiring an object because another does too - does not come clearly to the foreground in Jackson's story as Girard, in his 1966 work Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, has shown it does in other novels, such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (first published in two volumes - 1605 and 1615) Stendahl's The Red and the Black (first published in 1830), or Flaubert's Madame Bovary (first published in 1856). However, it is implicitly there in the children's play at the start of the story - where "the feeling of liberty sits uneasily on most of them [and] they tend to gather quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play" (Jackson 1949:211). Indeed, the very sentence suggests the children are as susceptible to a sacrificial crisis as the adults: unsure what to do with themselves when the shackles of a system are removed, they first sort themselves quietly into groups to assess one another before everything collapses into roughhousing. Mimetic desire is also implicitly there in the adults' tentative remarks about other villages doing away with the lottery and their own desire to do as the others are doing, but a desire shot down by lack of approval from other members of the group. The signs of building bulwarks against an impending sacrificial crisis and of regulating mimetic desire into acceptable channels are there in the spoken and unspoken social hierarchies they have constructed: women organize themselves according to households, first gossiping with other women but then going "to join their husbands" (211) and then collect the children around them. The internalization of these ranking structures is evident in remarks such as Mrs. Dellacroix's exclamation of "There goes my old man" (215) as her husband goes up to draw for the family. The entire codification of the ritual, with the great deal of fussing, the swearing in of an official, the small talk that had once been a ritual salute, the reading out of the rules although few people consciously listen, all of this shows an attempt to regulate human behaviour and to impose a form of social control. What I suggest, though, is that it is not social control necessarily in service of the patriarchy nor of an economic power elite, but the attempt to control violence in humans through the establishment of a quasi-religious ceremony.

4. Conclusion

I would conclude by saying that what is missing from the community in Jackson's story are not only jails, criminals, police, and a sheriff, but churches, priests, and ministers, at least in the traditional sense. The village needs none of those since what it does have is a priest in the form of Mr Summers, the organizer of the lottery, and an ancient and violent ceremony that fulfils the need of a religion and renders meaningless the construction of a church. What they have is the lottery.

References

References

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Church, J. 1988. 'Getting Taken in The Lottery' in Notes on Contemporary Literature, vol. 18.4, pp. 10-11.

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Jackson, S. 1949 (1948). 'The Lottery' in The Lottery: Adventures of the Demon Lover. New York: Avon Books, pp. 211-19.

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Lamerson, J. M. 2010. 'Everyone Wins this Lottery' in Lamar Journal of the Humanities, vol. 35.1, pp. 25-31.

Oehlschlaeger, F. 1988. 'The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in The Lottery' in Essays in Literature, vol. 15.2, pp. 259-65.

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