requirements:
In a well-crafted piece of writing, ~500 words in length, answer the following question. Be sure to draw on the lesson notes and the concrete details of the story. Clearly, American towns do not engage in an annual sacrificial rite of stoning. At the literal level, the story is not representing reality. Of course, we regularly hear of violent incidents where an individual—for “reasons” of sex, race, religion, lifestyle—are singled out by a group and violently attacked, even killed. But Jackson is pointing to a more institutionally organized and sanctioned kind of violence. Given that the annual stoning is a fictive, imaginative event (though with historical precedents, like the pharmakos rites of ancient Greece), in what ways does it depict truths and realities about American (more broadly western) culture? Do we learn something about ourselves, our society and culture, through this story? If so, what?
Readings:
The Complicit Reader
1 In The Lottery, Jackson invites the reader into a Norman Rockwell-like, all-American New England village, before pulling the rug out with an act of horrific violence.
2 In the tale, villagers gather together in the central square of an unnamed village for an annual lottery. There is much excitement and interest surrounding the event, which we can call a rite, since it has ritual dimensions—it ends in a sacrifice.
3 Discussion of everyday life and happenings is intermingled with a bit of history about the lottery, and traditional and modern versions are compared. We learn about the particulars of this year’s lottery, and finally the winning family is selected, and from that family, a single member—Mrs. Hutchinson, who is summarily stoned to death by the villagers, including her family.
4 After publication of the story, Jackson publically stated that the model of the village and village life in the story was North Beddignton, Vermont, where she and her husband had lived for many years.
5 Certainly she was not referring in any literal sense to an annual rite practiced by the villagers of North Beddington; but she was suggesting a violence that underlay the foundations of her liberal, middle class world.
6 The narrative, though simple, is masterful. It invites readers—in particular, the gentrified readership of the New Yorker Magazine in which the piece was first published—into an act of identification with the villagers, thus making the reader complicit in the act of scapegoating that eventuates in the stoning of Mrs. Hutchinson.
7 Many readers of the story actually wind up feeling manipulated. Did your reading provoke any such emotions?
8 In the podcast discussion between A.M. Homes and Debora Triesman, they devote quite some time to the story’s aesthetic features, the techniques used to draw the reader in, which generates the sense of shock at the end.
The Scapegoat
1 James Frazer, in the “The Golden Bough” discussed how mythological narratives are often woven around the theme of a sacrificial killing of an animal or person, with this sacrifice connected to cyclical, season renewal, the fertility of the land, and the maintenance of social order.
a One example taken-up by Frazer is the pharmoki of ancient Greece.
b. Podcast 11.1 The Scapegoat (transcript):
In ancient Greece, there was practiced an annual rite of cleansing or purification in which two individuals of lowly status (the destitute and deformed of the city, criminals, outcasts) were selected to be pharmoki, Greek for “scapegoats.” They were paraded out on the streets, where they suffered verbal and physical abuse, before being cast out of the city. The pharmakos took into themselves, had projected upon them, the guilt of the city. Scapegoating these desolate, abused and abandoned individuals, that is, sacrificing them, was a way for the city to cleanse itself of vice or sin.
In representing the depravity and guilt of the community, these figures had the strange power of delivering the community from their own depravity guilt. Following the annual rite, the city was once again clean, innocent, pure, sacred. Because the humiliation and expulsion of the pharmokos created a sense of unity and well-being within the community, the expelled individuals, and the practice itself, oddly enough, acquired an aura or qualities of sacredness.
Hence, a pharmakos, a scapegoat, was an ambivalent figure: weak, yet somehow possessing a transformative power; profane but yet somehow, by virtue of this power, sacred; poisonous to the social order, yet somehow intimately connected to the cure of social ills; dirty and deformed and mad, and yet somehow a figure of respectful awe.
The pharmakos was both pitied and feared, though which of these emotions holds sway is of utmost importance to the political and moral implications of stories about scapegoats.
As feared beings, the scapegoat symbolically carries that which we fear within ourselves. Sacrificing the feared scapegoat, casting them out of the city, was a way of hiding or masking qualities and values that are actually dominate in a culture, but can be displaced on to others, whom can then be justly punished. In this sense, scapegoating consolidates a hierarchy, a worldview, authority and political power, while divesting a few of their own rights and power.
As a pitied being, the pharmakos reveals the failings of a social order that allows or requires such injustice that would produce deformed, devalued and marginalized people in the first place. The scapegoat is a sign that holds itself up as a mirror to society that seeks to expel it from its midst. In this sense, the pitied scapegoat may have potentially transformative power. A scapegoat incarnates the very being of the social order, and by so doing symbolizes it failures.
According to Rene Girard, an influential literary critic who developed a theory about the intersection of religion and violence, one of the achievements of great works of literature—in Judaism, Christianity, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, modern novelists such as Dostoevsky—is that these works lay bare the scapegoat mechanism, allowing the reader to perceive that it is an “innocent victim” that is subjected to expulsion, humiliation, and sacrifice.
Girard writes, “The biblical and Christian power of understanding phenomena of victimization comes to light in the modern meaning of certain expressions such as “scapegoat.” [The term] “scapegoat [originally refers to] the [animal] victim in the Israelite ritual that was celebrated during a great ceremony of atonement (see Leviticus 16:21)…. The ritual consisted of driving into the wilderness a goat on which all the sins of Israel had been laid. The high priest placed his hands on the head of the goat, and this act was supposed to transfer onto the animal everything likely to poison relations between members of the community. The effectiveness of the ritual was the idea that the sins were expelled with the goat and then the community was rid of them. This ritual of expulsion is similar to that of the pharmakos in Greece, but it is much less sinister because the victim is never a human being. When an animal is chosen, the injustice seems less, or even nonexistent. This is no doubt why the scapegoat ritual doesn’t move us to the same repugnance as [human scapegoating]. But the principle of transference is no less exactly the same. In a distant period when the ritual was effective as ritual, the transfer of the community’s transgressions onto the goat must have been facilitated by the bad reputation of this animal, by its nauseating odor and its aggressive sexual drive. In the… archaic world [of myth] there are rituals of expulsion everywhere…. In the case of the scapegoat the process of substitution is so transparent that we understand it at first glance…. The modern understanding of “scapegoats” is simply part and parcel of the continually expanding knowledge of [processes]… and events of victimization. The Gospels and the entire Bible nourished our ancestors for so long that our heritage enables us to comprehend these phenomena and condemn them” (from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Orbis Books, pp. 154-155).
In other words, in Girard’s reading, a key feature of the historical development of religion, morality, and law in the western world, rooted as these are in Judeo-Christian and Greek heritage, is centered on a growing awareness of how processes of victimization work. When we refer to someone or some group as a “scapegoat,” we are drawing on the moral perceptivity afforded us by centuries of assimilating understandings offered though the literary inheritance of works in Judaism, Christianity and elsewhere.
Jackson’s The Lottery stands in a long line of stories that attempt to reveal the social, psychological and religious workings of scapegoating.
“The biblical and Christian power of understanding phenomena of victimization comes to light in the modern meaning of certain expressions such as “scapegoat.” [The term] “scapegoat [originally refers to] the [animal] victim in the Israelite ritual that was celebrated during a great ceremony of atonement (see Leviticus 16:21)…. The ritual consisted of driving into the wilderness a goat on which all the sins of Israel had been laid. The high priest placed his hands on the head of the goat, and this act was supposed to transfer onto the animal everything likely to poison relations between members of the community. The effectiveness of the ritual was the idea that the sins were expelled with the goat and then the community was rid of them. This ritual of expulsion is similar to that of the pharmakos in Greece, but it is much less sinister because the victim is never a human being. When an animal is chosen, the injustice seems less, or even nonexistent. This is no doubt why the scapegoat ritual doesn’t move us to the same repugnance as [human scapegoating]. But the principle of transference is no less exactly the same. In a distant period when the ritual was effective as ritual, the transfer of the community’s transgressions onto the goat must have been facilitated by the bad reputation of this animal, by its nauseating odor and its aggressive sexual drive. In the… archaic world [of myth] there are rituals of expulsion everywhere…. In the case of the scapegoat the process of substitution is so transparent that we understand it at first glance…. The modern understanding of “scapegoats” is simply part and parcel of the continually expanding knowledge of [processes]… and events of victimization. The Gospels and the entire Bible nourished our ancestors for so long that our heritage enables us to comprehend these phenomena and condemn them” (from Rene Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Orbis Books, pp. 154-155).
1 In writing “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson was drawing on both the long history of scholarship about rites and myths of expulsion and sacrifice and on those literary traditions that expose the victimization inherent in these rites and myths.
2 The twist Jackson gives this topic however, is to suggest that her stable, middle class, liberal world is founded on a violence little different from the stability afforded the Greek city-states via their expulsion of the pharmakoi. We unconsciously continue to engage in scapegoating, and her story is meant to reveal this ugly truth. Even little Davy Hutchinson is holding some stones in his hand.
3 The story suggests that people are easily and comfortably swayed by tradition and the status quo. One villager says, ““We have always had a lottery as far back as I can remember. I see no reason to end it.” Jackson seems to be pointing to a moral inertia in dominant society. The story is thus meant as a kind of shock treatment.
4 Taking the tendency to stick with the status quo an interpretive step further, the story reveals the power of mimetic violence inherent in group or mass psychology. There are a few who question the lottery, but they go along with it in the end. Rene Girard coined the term “mimetic violence.” The word “mimetic” comes from the Greek, mimesis, meaning imitation, copy, or representation.
5 People, argues Girard, are mimetic creatures—we learn through imitation, and we imitate not just behaviours and adopt common moral views—we also imitate each other’s desires, even the desire to do harm to another. The must-have Christmas toy, the newest version of an ipod, the television shows we collectively watch—all of these behaviours have mimetic qualities – we imitate what others do, and desire what others desire. A “contagion” is a rapid escalation of mimetic desire, one that typically ends in violence. The killing of the scapegoat placates murderous energies, for a time.
6 Jackson includes the notion that the lottery might die out. We learn that some parts of the rite have lapsed, and later in the story Steve Adams tells Old Man Warner “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.” A moment later, Mrs. Adams says, “Some places have already quit lotteries.” What is the significance of this statement? Where are these places? What is required to end mimetic violence?
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