Vermont Gothic
May 19, 2010, 7:52 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
Do you remember the short story “The Lottery”? I remember reading it in eighth grade, and the chills that went down my spine when I realized what was going down.
The idea came to Shirley Jackson while pushing her child in a baby carriage.
“’The ending of this story came as quite a jolt to my wife and, as a matter of fact, she was very upset by the whole thing for a day or two after,’” wrote one of Jackson’s correspondents.
I first read “The Lottery” in ninth grade, and I can relate to the jolt that the ending provided, though like any good author, Jackson laid down some clues as to where she might be heading that are more obvious on re-reading. My English teacher at the time, a scholastic, had us reading fiction with surprise endings. Prior to “The Lottery,” we’d read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper.” I enjoyed those short stories, but the teacher definitely saved the best for last.
I remember my first reading of it, too. Not in the New Yorker, 1948, but reprinted, probably in Coronet or Pageant, in the early 1950s.
A perfect short story.
Here’s the New Yorker for sale, $1215. (They’re wrong about the plastic sleeve.)
http://www.aaabooks.com/search.php?item_id=8541
Gerelyn –
Yes, perfect and horrible. Original sin and the banality of evil, but terribly exaggerated nevertheless.
It’s a pity they’re giving it to eigth graders to read. Kids are so malleable at that age, and if they’re fed too much of such adult stuff (which they are) they grow up thinking that people are generally terribly wicked. My 7-year old niece just read a book about everyone living under the earth because the surface has all been destroyed. That’s too much for a little kid, I think. Not to mention all the violence most kids see in the media. It’s bound to color their view of the world. No wonder they revert to violence, even murder, to solve their problems and suicide is up among teenagers. I’ve even read about 4 year old children being treated for depression.
Censorship for the young? You betcha.
But I wonder if Jackson’s moral is one that needs to be made for adults. One other of the few perfect short stories has a very similar basic theme — our propensity to accuse innocent people. I mean deMaupassant’s “A Piece of String”.
Speaking of perfect short stories and guilt, does anyone know the name and author of a short story about a Japanese woman who is cautioned not to go at night into the mountains, where the foxes are. She goes anyway, and when she returns she has no face. A real horror story. I thought it was by Lafcadio Hearn, but I can’t hind it there. It’s haunted me many years, and I’d like to look for an explanation of it. I’m not satisfied with any I come up with.
(Sorry to behave like Fr. O’Leary.)
“I have read of some queer cults in my time,” wrote a reader from Los Angeles, “but this one bothers me.”
Indeed.
A question that occurs to me as I read the link you’ve provided, Cathleen: how many women of that post-war period might have pondered writing a story something like this, as they pushed their baby carriages?
I suppose I ask that question, in part, because of a tragedy that occurred in my family right around the time Jackson wrote the story. A cousin of my father’s, who was apparently one of the first women to earn an advanced degree in her field (marine biology, I think) at her state university killed both herself and her newborn baby.
As an adult, I’ve come to realize that this was likely an extreme case of post-partum depression. But I’ve also wondered if it was exacerbated by the experience many women must have had at that point in history, when they earned advanced degrees, wanted to use their minds and have a career, and were expected, instead, to raise children and be homemakers.
Nothing at all wrong, of course, with having children and being a homemaker. A wonderful vocation, in fact, for women who have chosen it freely. But I wonder if at some points in history social pressure has been strong for all women to choose that vocation, when some women are not particularly suited or called to it.
I may be thinking along these lines because I’m now reading for the first time Marilyn French’s novel “Women’s Room.” And I recall seeing some years ago a documentary on the women of the “beat” generation, and what happened to some of those women as they challenged social conventions in the late ’40s and 1950s. That’s in the back of my mind as I read the article about “The Lottery.”
Quick topic change: I think you’re right about Lafcadio Hearn, Ann. I think the story is his “Mujina” in his book “Kwaidan.”
Maybe. I think Jackson’s issues were a bit different, and I thought the article emphasis on alienated women as a bit too reductive–she was an eccentric outsider in a small town:
http://www.salon.com/jan97/jackson970106.html
UPDATE: Yes, there seems to be a multifaceted eccentricity:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/03/22/the-strange-world-of-stanley-edgar-hyman-and-shirley-jackson-essay/
Another perfect short shory: Anatole France’s “Crainquebille”.
Hi, Ann!
Have to disagree about censorship for the young. (Or for anyone.) I was about 9 or 10 when I read The Lottery, and I understood it without thinking people in general were wicked.
I think children should read whatever they’re capable of reading. Certainly getting stoned to death in The Lottery is no worse than being stoned to death a la St. Stephen.
Gerelyn –
I think it is one thing to let kids pick books out in libraries and another to require something in an English class. I wonder if there are any studies on this point. I know that the psychologists say it is clear that when kids — and adults — are presented with too much violence. real or make-believe, they become indifferent to it or become more violent themselves. (Sorry, no citations.) I’m just convinced that violence in American culture is at the evil heart of a great many of our ills, including our propensity to think that war at least settles matters. I’m a big First Amendment supported too, but not for children. They are by definition not totally formed and can become deformed if we aren’t careful. This, of course, requires telling them No more often than parents seem to think necessary these days. But so be it.
Sorry, that’s off topic. Or is it?
Cathleen, I think you’re right about the “multifaceted eccentricity.”
It has been years since I read a biography of Jackson, but that’s definitely one of the things I recall about her from whatever biographies I’ve read in the past.
And, of course, personal traits can be accentuated by the culture in which one lives, so without being reductionistic, one might perhaps wonder if she was an eccentric whose eccentricity was enhanced by some aspects of the culture of her period?
” I wonder if there are any studies on this point. I know that the psychologists say it is clear that when kids — and adults — are presented with too much violence. real or make-believe, they become indifferent to it or become more violent themselves.”
———-
Yes, Fredric Wertham ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent ) was a psychiatrist who got famous by denouncing the great old horror comics that I devoured as a child. Ooooh, they were soooo gruesome. Almost as scary as fairy tales.
I grew up across the street from a library and half-a-block from a confectionery store that sold all the great pre-Seduction of the Innocent horror comic books. From the congressional hearings about Wertham’s warnings about the dangers of comic books I learned that some adults are hypocrites.
From Mark Twain’s great short stories, “The Good Little Boy” and “The Bad Little Boy”, I learned the same thing.
” But I wonder if at some points in history social pressure has been strong for all women to choose that vocation, when some women are not particularly suited or called to it.”
William, how old are you? There is no “wonder” at all. That is what the emancipation of women is all about. It is not one point but throughout history. This is what brought Mary Daly to refuse to answer questions from males at her lectures. Jackson’s story of the clerk insisting on housewife is ageless.
As for the lottery. I still do not like unhappy endings. After watching “Rosemary’s Baby” I walked out of the movie sick to my stomach. My children love horror movies. I still will not watch them. But I used to love boxing until I realized how awful a sport it is. Go figure.
The Lottery, after its publication in 1948 (?) apparently drew the largest amount of mail that any piece had ever drawn to the New Yorker, and I believe the record still stands. Many years ago, when I was studying in Taiwan, my wife Deborah volunteered to teach a group of Chinese adults advanced English, and gave them various short stories to read. One of them was The Lottery, and they asked her, in horror, whether the US was really like that? (one of them told me of his memories as a school child in Taiwan, when it was still under Japanese rule, of being marched out to the local airfield with all his schoolmates to watch their teacher take off on a kamikaze mission — pretty Gothic itself, in a way).
Vermont Gothic the Lottery may be (Jackson lived in Bennington, where her husband, Stanley Hyman, taught at Bennington College in the late 40s and 50s. The story, however, never betrays its geographical setting, although theoretically while it might be set anywhere, it’s pretty clearly northern New England; and indeed in the late xviii century there was a witch drowned by townspeople somewhere in what is now southern Vermont.
And we got 7″ of snow on 28 April. Isn’t that, like, also Gothic?
Bill Mazella, to answer your question, I’m 60.
And my statement about wondering was a bit of rhetorical fausse naivete, because when one treads into some discussions where there may be hidden minefields, one tends to engage in hyper-correction of the points one wants to make.
As a male commenting on issues that have to do with women’s consciousness or women’s emergence from oppression, I always want to remain aware–and to suggest through my wording–that I am, in some respects, an outsider to the experiences about which I’m commenting. And that I have no right to claim to comment as if I’m on the inside.
The need to watch for mines often seems even more imperative, in my view, when one discusses these issues within Catholic circles, too, where there can often be whiplash re: gender issues. And where there are many insider-outsider lines to remind folks (sometimes) that the club has rules that aren’t immediately apparent to newcomers.
(I’m 60, and still painfully aware that I’m a newcomer to the club I joined when I became Catholic 43 years ago.)
William,
Ok.