The Lottery

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Jackson is a resistant figure whose resistance is moral rather than metaphysical. She did not reject the supernatural; she took it seriously as a category. What she resisted was the comfortable fiction that ordinary communities are fundamentally decent — that the violence which erupts in her fiction is an aberration rather than a latent condition of social life itself.

The Violence Beneath the Surface

“The Lottery” is one of the most theologically precise short stories in American literature, though Jackson would not have described it in those terms. Its central insight is that the scapegoating mechanism — the selection of a victim who will bear the community’s violence and thereby purge it, at least temporarily — is not a primitive survival from a barbaric past but a permanent feature of social life that can operate in the most ordinary and respectable communities.

This is the insight that the French literary theorist René Girard would later develop systematically, but Jackson rendered it imaginatively first. The Hutchinson family is not marked out by any moral failure; Tessie Hutchinson is not more wicked than her neighbors. She is simply unlucky. The lottery selects a victim randomly because the violence it channels has nothing to do with guilt. It has to do with the community’s need to discharge its aggression onto a designated target.

What Hill House Reveals

The Haunting of Hill House is a novel about a house that is, in some sense, alive — that has a will inimical to human flourishing and that selects its victims from among the psychologically vulnerable. Eleanor Vance, the novel’s protagonist, arrives at Hill House already damaged by years of self-suppression in the service of an invalid mother, and the house finds her and claims her.

What the novel reveals for TLA’s purposes is the relationship between psychological vulnerability and spiritual danger — the way in which the wounds that fallen human life inflicts on its members create openings for something darker. Jackson does not name what inhabits Hill House, but she renders its effects with a precision that the category of the demonic fits better than any secular psychological framework.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the serpent operates through the most ordinary social arrangements — through the violence that communities direct against their own members, through the scapegoating mechanism that Jackson’s fiction renders so precisely. The lottery is the serpent’s work wearing the face of tradition and community solidarity.

Jackson’s testimony is the testimony of a writer who refused to look away from this violence — who insisted, against the comfortable mythology of American community life, that the stones are always there, that the people who throw them are ordinary, and that the victim could be anyone. This refusal is a form of prophetic witness, even if Jackson would not have used that language. The seed of the woman is not safe in Tessie Hutchinson’s village, and Jackson knew it.