(¡Updated!) Cheese, Stones, Death: A Woman's Life

     

This is one of the covers for Jackson's collection, which I think is a more accurate portrayal (I did not make this).

A block of cheese is, well, just a block of cheese, but add crackers, prosciutto, dried fruit, and fake leafery, and it becomes a charcuterie board. Not only is this something to keep in mind the next time you plan a soiree, but it serves as a clumsy metaphor for how Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” can also change in interpretation depending on the context. 

“The Lottery,” when read by itself, portrays the power of societal acceptance of a belief no matter its consequences. In this case, it is a society’s willingness to abide by a tradition whose meaning they have forgotten, even when the outcome is the death of one of their own townspeople. The quotation I selected shows Tessie Hutchinson, who won this fatal lottery, being stoned to death: “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.” As we discussed in class, it is significant that Tessie begins to realize the injustice of their tradition only after she is chosen because throughout most of the story, she was just like all of the other villagers--blindly accepting of the ritual. Tessie doesn’t comprehend the flaw in their society or that the villagers themselves have the power to end this tradition. 

I agree with this interpretation, but I would like to offer an alternative perspective. I have read this story before in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories. As the title states, the book is a collection of Jackson’s short stories, which are often unsettling, odd, and sometimes just plain violent. They are not related, but there is a recurring theme of the protagonist--who is always a woman with the exception of a feminine man--feeling a lack of control over her situation:

• “The Daemon Lover,” for example, is about a woman on her wedding day whose fiancée never shows up. She searches for him all over town, but none of the townspeople take her seriously. By the end, she never finds him--the reader isn’t even sure if the fiancé ever existed--but she isn’t able to accept that he is gone and cannot do anything but wait for him to return.

• The female protagonist in the story “Pillar of Salt” also feels an absence of control, and it seeps into her perception of reality. A woman is visiting New York with her husband when she begins to feel suffocated. She first believes the building is on fire while at a party (the fire happens to be two buildings down). Later, she believes she feels a building shaking and sees the windowsills and roof crumbling like sand. The story ends with her stranded at a crosswalk conflicted whether or not to walk across. 

• Not all of the stories are as subtle. The story “The Witch” is quite macabre. It is a story of a man telling a little boy that just like the little boy, the man also has a little sister; however, he describes how he killed her by strangling her and chopping her up. The little boy is fascinated by the man’s story and says how they can chop his mom’s head off, too.

The first two stories describe a woman in an uncontrollable situation and in the end, neither of them are able to regain a sense of control or their reality. 'The Witch'' represents this idea as well; the way they discuss cutting up and physically torturing the sister seems to be a metaphor for how women feel when society batters them. The other stories in Jackson’s collections are similar, and “The Lottery” can also be seen in this light. 

Tessie is chosen by chance in the story itself, but for Jackson, it was a choice. She could have selected a man or a child to be stoned to death, but it is meaningful that she chose a woman, a representation of a wife and mother. With this in mind, Tessie’s exclamation, “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’” no longer speaks to just the lottery, but in context of the other stories, she is protesting the unfairness of how women are treated by society. The final words, “then they were upon her,” illustrates how society beats the women down. Jackson makes an interesting point to include women and children in this image. It was the other women, Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Dunbar, who were described preparing to throw their stones, and even Davy, Tessie’s son, was given pebbles to throw at his mother. Jackson seems to be saying how society as a whole, not just men, perpetuates the women’s feeling of lack of control.

A brief comparison of the cover designs for The Lottery and Other Stories supports the same analysis. Many of the covers focus only on "The Lottery," including illustrations of stones, the slips of paper in the black box, a hand holding the paper with the black dot, etc. While it is true that "The Lottery" is significant to Jackson's collection (it's even mentioned in the title), I don't believe it accurately represents Jackson's message. The cover that I think does unite all of Jackson's stories depicts a face of a woman that is cut into pieces and rearranged. There is a significant difference in the tone of these covers. Rather than focusing on the horror of the tradition, the cover with the woman's face highlights the underlying meaning of the violence--the result of society’s effect on women and their reality. 

It is important to note that “The Lottery” is the last short story in the collection. As the women in the other stories are given ambiguous endings and it is unsure whether the woman regains her control, “The Lottery” is the only story with a definitive ending to the woman’s life (in both a figurative and literal sense). Tessie punctuates the injustice with her scream before she is physically silenced to death; it is the finale to Jackson’s overarching theme.