Morality In The Lottery And The Last Duchess

In life people tend to heavily rely on others, because we aren’t an independent species. Because of this, when we are told what things are “right” and “wrong” by our leaders, we believe them and follow what they say. This is how society has functioned since the beginning of time. As people, when we follow our leaders we begin to heavily rely on them losing all of our ability to step back to our own conscious reality, and decide whether or not the actions we are doing are humane or inhumane. In the story The Lottery we see this to its full extent, as well as in The Last Duchess, both of these stories show How a group of people can lose their morality, and follow a blind tradition without any regard to the outcomes.

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Our first example of this is In The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, a small town of nearly 300 villagers is beginning their lottery. Although it is not a normal lottery, In this lottery the winner is stoned to death by the rest of the village. This act is a perfect example of how a whole town can do horrible and inhumane things such as stoning an innocent person to death, just to follow blind tradition. When Tessie Hutchinson a believer in this “Lottery” shows up late to the town meeting because she forgets that the event is today. She seemed cheerful and happy unknowingly that she was soon to be horribly murdered. When her family was chosen and she was picked to be killed she immediately thought of how unfair this really was. If only the rest of the town could have this realization and understand that how brutal and unfair this tradition was. Unfortunately in life, to understand if a tradition is cruel or inhumane you may need to be put in the shoes of the victim. Though that is usually too late. At that

It is shown by forced marriage. The duke and the young girl were forced to marry and because they weren’t acquainted with each other the Duke misunderstood the girls happiness