Anyone Can Be a Monster: Learned Cruelty in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

The village square is bright with summer sun. Children stack stones. Women gossip about dinner. The men stand a little apart, joking about taxes. Then the name is read out, the crowd closes in, and Tessie Hutchinson is stoned to death by her neighbours.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" was published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and almost immediately became the most controversial short story the magazine had ever printed. Subscribers cancelled in droves. Readers wrote in baffled, furious, sometimes pleading: was it a true story? Did such villages exist? Jackson, who never explained the story in print, would say in a rare lecture that she had hoped to "shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."

That is one way to read the story. The richer reading is the one the title of this piece points to: anyone, given the right village and the right tradition, can be a monster. Monstrosity in Jackson is not a property of the unusual person. It is a property of the ordinary one.

The argument: monsters are made by the ordinary

We tend to use the word monster for the deviant — the serial killer, the dictator, the fairy-tale ogre. The implication is that monstrosity sits outside us, in some other species of person we will never become. Jackson's central move is to remove that distance. The lottery is not run by villains. It is run by neighbours. Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, performs the ritual seventy-seven times before the story opens. Mrs. Delacroix, who chatted warmly with Tessie ten pages earlier, picks up "a stone so large she had to pick it up with two hands." There is no aberration. There is no ringleader. There is only a community doing what it has always done, on a fine June morning, because it is what they do.

The story is constructed so that the reader cannot escape into "well, those people are different from me." Jackson refuses every detail that would make the village exotic. The square has a post office. The boys collect rocks for fun. The list is read in alphabetical order. Even the language is bureaucratic — Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery, also runs the square dances and the Halloween program. The unspoken accusation is that the reader's own village, in some other form, has its own lottery, and that the reader would pick up a stone when their name was called to do so.

Four mechanisms of learned cruelty

Jackson's story shows, with unusual economy, the specific mechanisms by which ordinary people become capable of extraordinary harm. Four of them carry most of the weight.

The normalization of ritual. The lottery has happened every year for as long as anyone can remember. The black box is splintering. The chips of wood the original ceremony used have been replaced with paper. Nobody remembers the original "tuneless chant" the official was once supposed to recite. Yet "the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, but they still remembered to use stones." Normalization does not require that anyone defend the practice — only that the practice continue. Each repetition makes the next one easier, and after several decades the question of why has fallen so far below the question of when that the why no longer presents itself.

Tradition as moral cover. Old Man Warner is the story's clearest spokesman for this mechanism. When he hears that other villages are talking about giving up the lottery, he is appalled: "Pack of crazy fools," he says. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more." For Warner, the lottery is not something one weighs. It is the thing that makes the village a village. To question it is to question whether civilization itself should continue. Tradition supplies a moral shortcut: if a practice has always existed, it must serve some purpose, and refusing it is the wrong against which violence is justified.

Selfishness disguised as fairness. Tessie's final cry is the most telling line in the story. She does not say this is wrong. She does not say we should not do this. She says, "It isn't fair, it isn't right." Tessie is happy with the lottery so long as it is happening to someone else. Her objection arrives only at the moment she becomes the target. Earlier, when her husband draws the marked paper for the family, she insists her married daughter should also have to draw — extending the danger to her own child to dilute her own. Jackson's quiet observation is that the ordinary instinct toward self-preservation, in a system that pits neighbours against each other, can drive otherwise decent people to wish harm upon almost anyone, including the people they love most, so long as the harm is not directed at them.

The diffusion of responsibility. No single villager kills Tessie. The crowd kills her. Every individual stone is small. Each thrower can tell themselves that their stone did not, on its own, do the damage. This is the same mechanism that lets a firing squad operate when the soldiers are told that one of the rifles holds a blank. The shared act dissolves the agent. Jackson never shows us anyone hesitating. The crowd moves "with a roar," and then the story ends.

Why "anyone" is the operative word

The reading that locates monstrosity in the deviant has the comfort of being unfalsifiable. That person, that family, that culture, that era — monstrous. Us — never. Jackson's title — and ours — refuses the comfort. Anyone can be a monster because the conditions that produce monstrosity are not rare. Normalization, tradition, self-interest, and diffused responsibility are features of every community that has ever existed. The lottery is unusual. The mechanisms behind it are not.

This is why the story has outlasted its specific historical moment. Critics in 1948 read it as a parable about the Holocaust, or about American conformity, or about the Cold War McCarthyism then taking shape. Each reading was correct because each reading was a different lottery operating on the same machinery. "The Lottery" is not a story about Nazis or about small-town America. It is a story about how groups, under pressure to maintain themselves, will harm members and call the harm necessary.

How to write about the story

If you are writing a high-school or undergraduate essay on "The Lottery," the surest move is to resist the reading that the villagers are simply primitive or backward. Jackson worked hard to make them not so. They are bureaucratic, polite, recognizable, even sympathetic in fragments — Mrs. Hutchinson teases her husband about being late, Mr. Summers carries the paperwork in a folder. The essay's strongest claims will come from treating the villagers as fully ordinary and then asking what makes ordinary people capable of stoning a neighbour to death.

A useful structure: open with the most ordinary detail in the story (the boys gathering rocks for the pile is the conventional choice, but the children's casual return from school works just as well), pose the question of how that ordinariness coexists with what happens forty minutes later in the same square, and use the four mechanisms above — or the three you find most defensible — to walk the reader from one to the other.

The conclusion writes itself if the body has done its work: not that the villagers are unique, not that the lottery is unique, but that the conditions Jackson identified are general. That is the reading the story has earned over almost eighty years of being misread and feared and assigned, and it is the reading that lets a literary text do something more useful than scare us. It lets us see ourselves clearly enough to do better.

Companion reading

Lord of the Flies covers similar ground from a different angle. William Golding's boys are not bound by an inherited ritual; they invent one. The Lord of the Flies and Tessie Hutchinson die for different reasons, but the underlying claim is the same: monstrosity is what happens to a group of people who agree, often without quite agreeing, that someone among them must be sacrificed for the group to continue. Jackson and Golding belong on the same syllabus.

For a Romantic-era treatment of the same theme on the individual scale rather than the social one, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the obvious next read. The creature in that novel is monstrous because he is treated as one — a small-scale dramatization of how a community produces what it then condemns.