The Lottery and The Little House Essay Example

temporarily flawed, in the long run the house promises to be a great boon to Elizabeth: “Well, I’m here, the told herself, and it belongs to me and I can do anything I want here and no one can ever make me leave, because it’s mine…. it was hers, it belonged to her—and felt a sudden joy at the tangible reality of the little house” (171). This beginning is told in a realistic style, without implications of any phantasmal anxieties, but it is also deeply symbolic. For Elizabeth the house is already a symbol of autonomy and freedom.

In “The Lottery” the beginning is similarly written in a realistic style but contains symbolic meanings. The almost excessive verdure—the flowers blossoming, the rich green of the grass—will make sense once the symbolic code of sacrificial regeneration emerges. At once realistic as scenery description, the opening paragraph verges on the stylization of allegory. In both stories the realism of the beginning is shot through with glimpses of the symbolic that will make the symbolic turn more startling for the reader.

The endings of the stories should also be re-described as more than simplistically symbolic. It is certainly true that something changes in the end of “The Lottery,” but on re-reading Jackson’s use of foreshadowing shows that the violence does not erupt out of nowhere. Signs of discomfort and anxiety have been surfacing all along. Among the children at the beginning, “the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them,” (225) the men “smiled rather than laughed” (226).

Once the drawing begins the people are “quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around…. holding the small folded papers in their large

hands, turning them over and over nervously” (229). Once Bill Hutchinson is revealed as the “winner,” the anxiety of Tessie becomes increasingly palpable. From the start of the story, then, Jackson has building a psychologically realistic ambiance of fear and discomfort. The violence that breaks out in the last couple lines is, ultimately, the only realistic explanation for the pervasive fear of the villagers.

The transition is not so much from the realistic to the symbolic as from what is psychologically internal to what becomes externalized through the actions of the community. In “The Little House” the ending is less clearly traumatic than in “The Lottery” but still carries the same psychological punch. The story actually has two ending, both menacing in their way. After the Dolson sisters have left, the narrative frame follows Elizabeth as she walks into the darkened second story.

“What’s waiting behind the door? he thought, and turned and fled wildly down the stairs and into the lighted kitchen with the locked back door. ‘Don’t leave me here alone,’ she said, turning to look behind her, ‘please don’t leave me here alone’” (178). Then the frame shifts to the sisters discussing Elizabeth disapprovingly. Like “The Lottery,” the discussion of the sisters, a generation older than Elizabeth, centers around how she has violated unspoken norms of society.

They appear to implicity agree to drive Elizabeth out of the neighborhood through soft intimidation. “Miss Caroline set down her plate, and nodded to herself. She might not like it here,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she won’t stay’” (179). Both of these are realistic in their descriptions of how people alone in dark houses feel and how social policing

operates, yet they also reveal a rupture in the facade of calm control that has heretofore held solid, especially in the juxtaposition of Elizabeth’s terror and Caroline’s proclamation.

Elizabeth’s terrified outburst and Caroline’s resolution that Elizabeth “might not like it here” objectively express what has been a subjective, private experience throughout. Roberta Rubenstein writes that sychoanalytically, a female’s anxieties about food and body image suggest that her body is (or once was) a battleground in the struggle for autonomy in the face of what she may experience as her mother’s consuming criticism, possessiveness, or withholding of love. (Rubenstein 309)

The Dolson sisters criticize Elizabeth precisely for failing to offer them food (178-179), and autonomy is what Elizabeth hopes to achieve in her new dwelling. The topic of food also raises the dynamic of consumption and internalization, the struggle to define what is inside and what is outside (Rubenstein 309-10).

But unlike the unilinear process of ingestion, in which what goes in the mouth stays inside, the process of internalization of Jackson’s symbolic and realistic goes both ways. These process appear like yin and yang or, to follow the imagery of consumption, like two snakes consuming the other. The symbolic emerges from the accretion of realism to a point where it can no longer contain the fears of real people, and realism occurs by the ordering of symbolic meanings in a way that makes sense to people.

This sense-making is necessarily a communal process, like the lottery itself. Realism emerges from a contract about what counts and what does not count that, like the lottery has no basis outside of our agreement that the world should appear and function in

a certain way. Despite their differences, the short stories “The Little House” and “The Lottery” share a double-helix structure of symbolism and realism that give both an eery atmosphere of claustrophobia and impending doom.

The intertwining of a symbolic code of violence into a realistic presentation of normal social life is integral to the affective impact of the stories. Since the “symbolic” finale has been part of the realism from the start, the reader is implicated as a guilty witness. Believing that the stories are innocent, despite the occasional alarums of anxiety, the reader is finally caught pretending not to see the violence that has always been everywhere.