Rereading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a Tale of Jim Crow America
Scholars have commonly placed Jackson’s fiction in the New England Gothic tradition. Her famous short story “The Lottery” is a case in point: universally seen as set in New England, it is often interpreted in the context of the region’s dark Puritan past. This contribution proposes a new context: th...
Αποθηκεύτηκε σε:
| Τόπος έκδοσης: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Κύριος συγγραφέας: | |
| Μορφή: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Γλώσσα: | Anglais |
| Έκδοση: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| Διαθέσιμο Online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Περίληψη: | Scholars have commonly placed Jackson’s fiction in the New England Gothic tradition. Her famous short story “The Lottery” is a case in point: universally seen as set in New England, it is often interpreted in the context of the region’s dark Puritan past. This contribution proposes a new context: the Jim Crow South. Drawing on biographical, textual, and historical evidence, it argues that the ritual violence depicted in the story speaks to the problem of violence in the South and maps on with remarkable precision to the ritual of lynching, which sustained the racist structure of Southern society in the Jim Crow era. To help make this argument, the essay also argues that “The Lottery” is a story designed to be reread, and that the second reading of the story, which is triggered by its shocking ending, is a wholly different experience from the first in that readers are led to discover a truth pointed out by the sociologist Émile Durkheim: namely, that much human violence is caused not, as some critics of “The Lottery” insist, by some innate evil or brutish instinct in human nature, but is “the product of a well-defined moral culture.” |
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