Identity In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“The Lottery” is a 1948 gothic horror fiction story written by Shirley Jackson. In the story, the villagers of a small town have an annual tradition where they gather together in the town square and have a “lottery”. Children run around and collect stones, putting them in their pockets and making a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed by the women. Each family gathers together and the head man of each household will pick a white card out of Mr. Summer’s, the lottery runner, and Mr. Graves’s, the postmasters, black box. Whichever man, in this story's case it ends up being Bill Hutchinson, gets the card with a black dot on it, his whole family must then pick out a white card out of the box. Tessie, his wife, ends up getting the black

Jackson consequently grew up with low self-esteem and a fragile sense of identity because she was verbally abused by her own mother. Her writing took shape through her failure to fit into the role of a traditional wife that she was expected to fill; she drank, smoked, and was interested in magic and witchcraft. Since she was not all pretty and petite like a woman during that time was supposed to be, her dark, horrid short stories often caused outrage and controversy from magazines and newspapers for being too perverted. So “The Lottery” was greatly influenced by Jackson’s life because during 1945-1946, women were supposed to leave their “man-jobs” they had to fulfill when World War 2 was going on, and go back to being traditional caregivers and homemakers. A lot of women, however, did not want to go back to tradition after getting a taste of what their full potential could be. “The Lottery” could very much be Jackson’s response to society wanting women to blindly follow their stereotypical tradition, by using the story to talk about how destructive and unnecessary traditions can

During the time this was written, women were still not taken seriously and were seen as not as intelligent as men. So, despite Tessie screaming out about how wrong and destructive the lottery was, she was overlooked because she was an inferior woman. Tessie and a couple of the other women of the town were very skeptical of the lottery, but none of the men of the town would listen because they wanted to follow the tradition of the lottery, completely disregarding the fact that the lottery was a murderous