Der of course everyone's going to say how wrong, and it should be discontinued. It should go without saying.
That's our cultural backup. I saw a made-for-tv movie based on this short story that did it a bit more justice, I think.
In the show, the villagers did this yearly using the person drawn in the lottery as a scapegoat for all their sins. They poured their sin and hate into that one person, a stand-in for Christ, I think because someone long ago interpreted a Biblical passage as such.
The filmmaker gave an explanation of why the stoning was necessary and continued. The interwoven story was a love story between a local and an "outsider." I don't remember any more details.
It's creepy, but it does have an underlying point. Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948. It is no accident that it was published in the New Yorker in the midst of World War II. That it vividly describes herd mentality and dehumanization of ones' own out of tradition is no accident.
There's a really good essay on the piece located here (http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko/jackson.html) by Peter Kosenko.
Shirley Jackson refused interviews, and gave only a cryptic answer when asked, by her stunned public, why she had written this horrific piece about an "average New England Village."
It is my firm belief she wrote it in response to the climate of the times. The Japanese, Germans, and Italians had been villified and revealed as an "other," but in mere decades prior (and after) they were just other world citizens. They had scapegoated the Chinese, Jews, and French respectively, a never-ending cycle of scapegoating and murder.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-03-08 12:30 am (UTC)That's our cultural backup. I saw a made-for-tv movie based on this short story that did it a bit more justice, I think.
In the show, the villagers did this yearly using the person drawn in the lottery as a scapegoat for all their sins. They poured their sin and hate into that one person, a stand-in for Christ, I think because someone long ago interpreted a Biblical passage as such.
The filmmaker gave an explanation of why the stoning was necessary and continued. The interwoven story was a love story between a local and an "outsider." I don't remember any more details.
It's creepy, but it does have an underlying point.
Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948. It is no accident that it was published in the New Yorker in the midst of World War II. That it vividly describes herd mentality and dehumanization of ones' own out of tradition is no accident.
There's a really good essay on the piece located here (http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko/jackson.html) by Peter Kosenko.
Shirley Jackson refused interviews, and gave only a cryptic answer when asked, by her stunned public, why she had written this horrific piece about an "average New England Village."
It is my firm belief she wrote it in response to the climate of the times. The Japanese, Germans, and Italians had been villified and revealed as an "other," but in mere decades prior (and after) they were just other world citizens. They had scapegoated the Chinese, Jews, and French respectively, a never-ending cycle of scapegoating and murder.
Karina Black//Ravenclaw