Analysis of “The Lottery”

The lottery: an ideological mechanism.

• serves to reinforce the village’s hierarchical social order

• instills unconscious fear in peope
• if they resist this order, they might be selected in the next lottery.

Village
• bank
• post office,
• grocery store
• coal business
• school system

Women = housewives = field hands (not working for wages)

Men = business (owners and/or wage earners)

Exhibits same socio-economic stratification that most people take for granted in a modern,
capitalist society.

Social ladder:

• Mr. Summers = most powerful man = owns largest business = coal company.
• also mayor =more time + energy + money + leisure  politics.

• Mr. Graves = government official = postmaster.

• Mr. Summers + Mr. Graves = political system.

• Mr. Martin = grocer = the economy. (Food = necessary for survival)

• Three most powerful men control town economically + politically + run the lottery.

• Mr. Summers = lottery official = sworn in by Mr. Graves.

• Both make the lottery slips.

• Mr. Martin holds lottery box as slips are stirred.

• During off-season, lottery box stored at either their businesses or homes.

• Thus, these are the folks who control the town control the lottery.

• Lottery takes place in the village square between post office and bank = 2 buildings
= government + finance.

• Same institutions from which Summers + Graves + Martin get their power.
QUESTION:
• What relationship is there between Summer’s interests as the town’s wealthiest
businessman and his officiating the lottery?

• Tessie Hutchinson gets the lottery slip with a black spot made by Summer the night
before in his coal-company office. What does that mean?

• If capitalism is the material organization of a social order, what does it mean to have
the leading capitalist be the leading politician?

• What kind of order is being promoted by the lottery?

Things to think about:

1. Lottery’s rules of participation reflect and codify a rigid social hierarchy based on an
unequal social division of labor.

2. The fact that everyone participates in the lottery and understands that its outcome is
pure chance gives a certain “democratic” aura that obscures the first codifying
function.

3. Villagers believe unconsciously that their commitment to a work ethic will grant them
some magical immunity from selection.

4. The work ethic prevents them from understanding that the lottery’s actual function is
not to encourage work per se but to reinforce an unequal social division of labor.

5. Tessie’s choice as lottery’s victim/scapegoat gives credence to the idea that the
lottery is an ideological mechanism which serves to defuse the average villager’s
deep, inarticulate dissatisfaction with the social order in which he lives by channeling
it into anger directed at the victims of that social order. It is reenacted year after
year not because it is a mere “tradition,” but because it served the repressive
ideological function of purging the village, a social body, of all resistance so that
business can go on as usual and the people like Summers, Graves, and Martin can
remain in power.

Rules of participation:

• Those who control the village economically and politically also administer the lottery.

• The rules also indicate who has power and who does not in the village’s social
hierarchy.

• These rules determine whose name is on the lists of who gets to choose slips in
rounds: one (heads of families), two (heads of households) and third (members of
each household in each family).

• The second round is missing from the story because the family patriarch who selects
the dot in the first round, Bill Hutchinson, has no married male offspring.

• When her family is chosen in the first round, Tessie objects that her daughter and
son-in-law did not “take their chance.” Summers reminds her “daughters draw with
their husbands’ families.”
 • Power in the village then is consolidated in the hands of male heads of families and
households, because males are the work force, providing the link between the
broader economy of the village and the family.

• Women are disenfranchised. Another example is Mr. Dunbar, who cannot attend the
lottery because of a broken leg. Although Dunbar has a wife and a sixteen-year-old
son, a proxy chooses his slip. Why? Dunbar’s son is presumably still in school and
not working.

• Jack Watson’s father is dead. He draws for him and his mother. Why? He is
probably older than Horace Dunbar.

• A careful reading of the story then appears to indicate that “head of households”
appear to be not just the oldest male but the oldest working male, and their power is
derived from working within the larger economy.

• Women, who have no direct link to the economy defined as capitalism—the arena of
activity in which labor is exchanged for wages and profits made---choose in the
lottery only in the absence of a “grown” working male.

Women then are subordinate in the socio-economic hierarchy of the village.

• For example, they wear “faded house dresses” and walk “shortly after their men
folk.”

• Dresses indicate that they work in the home and not within the larger economy
where work is regulated by money.

• Men see the women as belonging to their husbands.

• In many ways so do most of the women. The exception is Tessie.

Democratic illusion of the lottery:

• The lottery diverts the attention of the villagers from the capitalist economic relations
in which these power relations are grounded.

• While Mr. Graves says that everyone takes “the same chance,” which would appear
democratic, in effect, the idea that it singles out one person for privilege or attack is
not so evident.

• First, the selection is done in the village square.

• In capitalist dominated elections, business supports and promotes candidates who

will be more or less attuned to its interests, multiplying its vote through campaign
financing while each individual businessman can claim that he has but one vote.

• In the lottery, the village ruling class participates in order to convince others, and
maybe even themselves, that they are not in fact above everyone else during the
remainder of the year, even though their exclusive control of the lottery suggests
that they are.
 • For example, Mr. Summers wears jeans in order to convince the villagers that he is
just another one of the common folks, but he also wears a “clean white shirt,” which
is more appropriate to his class.

• He leans casually on the lottery box before the selection begins, much as a President
might put his feet up on the White House desk, as he talks to Graves and Martin, the
other members of his class.

• However democratic his early appeal for help in conducting the lottery might appear,
Martin, who responds, is the third most power man in the village.

• Summer’s appeal is essentially empty and formal, since the villages seem to
understand the unspoken rule of class that governs who administers the lottery. It is
not just anyone who can help Summers.

Thus, the lottery’s democratic illusion is an ideological effect that prevents the villagers from
criticizing the class structure of their society. But this illusion alone does not account for the
full force of the lottery over the village.

The lottery also reinforces a village work ethic that distracts the villagers’ attention from the
division of labor that keeps women powerless in their homes and Summers powerful in his
coal company office.

Old Man Warner appears as an apologist for this work ethic when he recalls an old adage,
“Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”

• Possibly in the past the lottery was a modern version of a planting ritual that might
once have prepared the village for the collective work necessary to produce a
harvest. Usually though, these rituals do not necessarily involve human sacrifice.

• Warner’s remarks also serves to establish an unspoken connection between the

lottery and work. But Warner does not explain how the lottery functions to motivate
work.

• In order to do so, it would have to inspire the villagers with a magical fear that their
lack of productivity would make them vulnerable to selection in the next lottery.

• The village women reveal such an unconscious fear after the last slip has been drawn
in the first round: “Who is it” “Who’s got it?” The names the women then
mentioned are the least “productive” families in the village.

• Warner’s commitment to the work ethic would be appropriate in an egalitarian

community, but it is not entirely innocent in the village, since it encourages villagers
to work without pointing out to them that part of their labor goes to the support and
leisure and power of a business class.

• At the end of his remarks about the lottery, Warner laments Summers’ democratic
conduct: “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up their joking with everybody.”
Yet this criticism obscures the fact that Summers is not about to undermine the
lottery, since by running the lottery he also encourages a work ethic which serves his
interest.
 • Remember, just before drawing the first round, Summers says somewhat casually
how “we” had better get this started “so’s we can go back to work.” The “we” in his
remark is deceptive; what he means to say is “so that you can go back to work for
me.”

Why Tessie?

• Her rebellion begins with her late arrival at the lottery.

• She says that she was doing her dishes and forgot what day it was.

• Her behavior, coupled with her comments, suggests her resistance to what the
lottery stands for as well as possible neglect for her specific job within the village’s
social division of labor.

• When she makes comments, the other villagers laugh, but it is a nervous laughter
because she challenges the traditional power relations between husbands and wives
as well as the village work ethic.

• She questions the rules of the lottery, which, in effect, relegate women to inferior
status as the property of their husbands.

• What is happening is that Tessie is a woman whose role as a housewife deprives her
of her freedom by forcing her to submit to a husband who gains his power over her
by virtue of his place in the work force.

• She rebels against her role, and such rebellion is just what the orderly functioning of
her society cannot stand.

• Unfortunately, her rebellion is entirely unconscious.

• She does not challenge the lottery per se, only her own selection as its scapegoat. It
would have been fine with her if someone else had been selected.

In stoning Tessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat onto which they can project and
“purge” or repress their own temptations to rebel.

• Rebellious impulses are channeled by the lottery and its attendant ideology away
from their proper objects---capitalism and capitalist patriarchs---into anger at the
rebellious victims of capitalist social organizations.

• The villagers cannot articulate their rebellion because massive force of ideology
stands in the way.

The lottery functions then to terrorize the village into accepting, in the name of work and
democracy, the inequitable social division of labor and power on which its social order
depends.

• When Tessie is selected and before she is stoned, Summers asks her husband to
“show her paper” to the others. By holding up the slip, Bill Hutchinson reasserts his
dominance over his wayward wife and simultaneous transforms her into a symbol to
the others of the perils of disobedience.
Note the role of the children in the village throughout the story.

• They are being socialized.

• The boys hoard and fight over stones as if stones were money.

• The girls stand off to the side and watch, just as they will be expected to remain
outside of the work force and dependent on their working husbands when they grow
up.

• Davy Hutchinson is given a few pebbles to stone his mother. The village makes sure
that Davy learns what he is supposed to do before he understands why he does it or
the consequences. But this does not mean that he could not learn otherwise.

After the stoning of Tessie, Bill Hutchinson will undoubtedly pat Davy on the back and tell
him, “Son, you did a good job; I am proud of you.”