Shirley Jackson Conformity

Conformity n: action in accord with prevailing social standards, attitudes, practice etc. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery Disillusionment of Ten O’clock by Wallace Steven both tell a story of conformity being amiss. Recruiting in Jackson's The Lottery for me to believe stoning a villager to death is okay because they call it tradition. Steven’s society adapted into having no imagination. I tried to keep this from being a conformist I agree with Steven and Jackson’s point of conformity being wrong. First, both literary works create characters who lack a personal image. In The Lottery, “Women wearing faded house dresses and sweater, come shortly after their menfolk” (101) Jackson implies that every woman in the village pale Easter egg color

For example The Lottery itself is an idea that is agreed to be okay throughout the community. The villagers have conformed to think it is perfectly fine, normal, and correct to stone a community member to death. Jackson states “... guess we better get started, get this over with, so’s we can get back to work.” (102) The character, Mr. Summers, says this quote as if assisting in murder is moral just because it has been done for many years in the past. Not one character is concerned with this tradition being corrupt. All of the villagers have become accustomed to the annual stoning because it is a tradition made up by some dead guy who once said “Hey, I have a modest proposal, how about every year the town gets together and we draw to see who gets to have stones thrown at them until they die. Sound good?” On the bright side the village isn’t eating their children like the people in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. ( ) At least these Villages are able to dream of a life without the lottery if they wanted to; in Steven’s poem the characters do not dream. “People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles”. (Steven, 147) Personally, I like to dream, but in this particular community of conformist I wouldn’t be able to dream. One cannot dream in Disillusionments of Ten O’clock because they will then have a different idea than others. Steven uses this to make the readers think about the

I think this characters play an important role in each of these writings; they make the problems more recognizable. In The Lottery the villager, Mrs. Hutchinson, was conformed to the ways of the village, the normality of the lottery. It was not until she was the winner that she produced hurt her feelings and spoke them out loud. “It isn’t fair, it isn't right” (Jackson, 106) are the words Mrs. Hutchinson screamed as she was being surrounded by people who were once called friends, neighbors and family. Mrs. Hutchinson was Jackson's first character to voice an opinion about the lottery. She was the first one to express feelings about the morbid tradition. Was the opinion useless? I would say the opinion was useless to the character in the story because gay do believe the lottery is fair and right. I would also say Mrs. Hutchinson's opinion was not useless in the context of the storyline because as readers we finally realize there has only been one individual stop Voice throughout the story. Then Shirley Jackson killed off her one character converting away from the traditional way of thinking. (Side note: Maybe Jackson isn’t teaching the importance of individualism, but instead expressing her thoughts on how personal or individual thoughts should be killed and conformist should rule the world. It all depends on how you look at it) on a serious note Jackson does create a