The use of this surname indicates that Tessie lives in a community which is totally deprived of tolerance. As a result, she was banned from Massachusetts in 1638.

The protagonist’s surname - Tessie Hutchinson - the villagers’ scapegoat, links her to Anne Hutchinson, who suffered prejudice because of her Antinomian beliefs that were considered heretical by the Puritan society.

The names of her characters are deliberately chosen. The author uses numerous symbols in order to portray the worst flaws of human nature. The themes themselves are not new: evil cloaked in seeming good prejudice and hypocrisy loneliness and frustration psychological studies of minds that have slipped the bonds of reality. Shirley Jackson’s insights and observations about man and society are distressing: Tessie Hutchinson’s fear and social rejection may represent the authors’ suffering at lack of her friends’ loyalty and the necessity to withdraw from the university. What is more, Lynette Carpenter makes the interesting remark that Jackson had a tendency to bestow her own features of character on her heroines. She created the story after she had been pelted with stones by some school children while she had been going home. Secondly, the short story villagers’ violence may have its origin in an incident from Shirley Jackson’s life. Is there any correspondence between the writer’s personal experiences and the image of society she depicts in “The Lottery”? First of all, the village described in the story seems to be similar to a rural area in which Jackson lived when she wrote it.

(Jackson in Kosenko 1985: 27)Īlthough the author succeeded in startling the readers, the motives for portraying the American society in such a way were still unclear. 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. In 1948 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Jackson accounted for her reasons behind writing the story:Įxplaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. Those who read Jackson’s story were totally confused and unable to understand the author’s intentions. Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker, in 1948 and it aroused a lot of controversy among the newspaper’s readers. The Picture of Society in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

Jackson the lottery summary