#also somehow this ended up abt the hunger games and i'm sorry abt that too lmao

[pennyserenade]

babe what were your feelings on the shirley jackson this month?

- mikaela

miranda's pseudo-book club / x

the lottery is the first of shirley jackson's works that i've ever read, believe it or not, and i really enjoyed it! after i read it, i did a bit more research and i found out that it was written in 1948--which only added a little bit more of a thrill to it for me. to produce something like that during the era of mccarthyism is just too fucking good, and i applaud jackson for being brave enough to do it.

i read this story because david duchvony wrote about it in his novel, miss subways. i've been itching to get my hands on shirley jackson's stuff--because i guessed it would be right up my alley--for awhile, and when he wrote that the hunger games were just a knock off of that story, i knew i had to read that first. i read it before i went into the hunger games, and i really enjoyed reading the hunger games with that thought in the back of my mind. i do think our lovely, pretentious mr. duchovny didn't entirely miss the mark with his commentary, but i also feel as if slighted the hunger games, and took away a bit of its brilliance by suggesting it was some poor imitation of this story. however, i do see the similarities: the crowned scapegoat being picked out of the box, the fear of change, the ways fear can transform and mar humanity, and this brutal desensitization of violence that allows audiences to view these acts as games instead of what they are: senseless violence. in both of these stories people believe and perpetuate the idea that if these acts of violence aren't done annually, there will be upheaval and destruction to deal with after. these are communities and societies that are put together by fear, unable to change, even going so far as making the rules static (in the lottery, they won't change the box, and in the end of the hunger games, its revealed that president snow is angry because katniss effectively changed the games without his say so; to take away the ritual is almost as bad as taking away the sacrifice to these people).

what i like about the lottery so much was how much it achieved in the 30ish pages it had. whereas the hunger games had nearly 400 pages to explore that world, the lottery did not, but it achieved much of the same effect regardless.

two particularly haunting parts of the story that have stuck with me is the little boys gathering the stones at the beginning, and the way that so many of the townspeople are so unfazed by this ritual as to be able to hold casual conversation about it. the boys in the lottery take me back to the hunger games, and this idea of stripping children of innocence by making them kill. to have these boys do something as innocuous as gathering stones together, before revealing what these stones are for (stoning a woman to death), accentuates the erroneous of these people's thoughts. whereas the capital uses this idea to prove that the districts are beastly people that must be controlled, lest they get any ideas, jackson uses it to show the ways that fear is harmful to humanity. these boys gather their stones like boys do--the act does not strip them of their being boys, but instead reinforces it--and when they use them to stone the woman, the audience is meant to find it incredibly ghastly. we aren't meant to think: god, humanity is sick and we must fix this with more brutality. we're meant to look at this and be shocked; to understand that this isn't right, and that we can't allow fear to transform us into people who allow acts of violence to happen with no thought.

as for the casual way the people speak in the lottery about the lottery: this reminded me a lot of the capital and its residents in the hunger games, too. it goes back to letting these acts occur without thinking about why, or if they actually matter at all, because they've all distanced themselves from the fact that this violence. the people of the capital view the games as necessary because they were told they were necessary. they remember the dark times of the wars, how they were all starving and struggling along collectively, and when someone came along and said: hey, we're going to make a game where the children of the districts murder each other each year so they know not to fuck with us, everyone went along with it. like the people in the lottery who want good crops and fortune for another year, the people in the capital want their luxuries and the sense of safety. both of these groups distance themselves from the brutality of their rituals because they believe they are for the better good. in the hunger games, they place bets on innocent children as they fight to the death in front of them, and in the lottery they nonchalantly stone a townsperson they all know because they figure: it must happen.