In response to questions about the "meaning" of the story, she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 22, 1948):
"Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. 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."
Check out this website for much more to add to your thinking on Shirley Jackson. http://northbennington.org/jackson.html
Excerpts from: NY Times OBITUARY http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1214.html
Excerpts from: NY Times OBITUARY http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1214.html
Shirley Jackson, Author of Horror Classic, Dies
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
NORTH BENNINGTON, Vt., Aug. 9--
Domesticity and the Macabre
Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.
In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story's mood.
Of all Miss Jackson's eerie and gruesome fantasies, "The Lottery," published in The New Yorker magazine, was the best known and most baffling to readers.
The dark and sinister story, opening on a quiet note, describes with mounting suspense, an annual village lottery to select a ritual victim to be put to death by stoning. The excitement is all in the selection of the woman's name from slips of paper in a black box.
The stoning itself is dispassionately cold-blooded. The magazine received hundreds of letters, virtually all of them demanding to know what the tale meant.
Housework Came First
Was the stoning a parable of institutionalized fury? Was it an exposition of the cruelty of conformity? Was it a statement of the fundamental baseness of man? Or was it just a good chiller?
No one could say for certain. But other stories and novels of a similar kind gave the impression that Miss Jackson was at bottom a moralist who was saying that cruel and lustful conduct is not far below the surface in those who count themselves normal and respectable, and that society can act with inquisitorial torture against individuals it finds odd. The harmless eccentric, Miss Jackson appeared to say, could be damned and killed with the ferocity usually reserved for overt social enemies...
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