In this post: A creepy look at the socialization of tradition and an excellent representation of how pervasive its effects can be. One of my favorite short stories!
Category: Fast Fiction + Short Story Collections
Hellooo again, Reminders! This is our second and last Spooky Season post. I hope you have a wonderful Hallo-weekend, and looking forward to reviewing more spooky stories for you next year!
Ramiah Recommended?
Yes!
"The Lottery" has been one of my favorite stories ever since my first read in high school. It was also the short story that introduced me to the horror genre of literature. Chilling and thriller-like in the span of a few pages, it is just as great of a story upon a reread as the first read.
The story takes place in the summer in a very domesticized town. Women are housewives, men are the head of households, and traditions drive the townsfolk and their actions. The tradition at the crux of the story is a lottery - for what, we do not know just yet.
As the lottery event begins, we see a mixture of emotions. Boys are excitedly gathering and piling up rocks, girls are standing at a distance but laughing with each other, women are gossiping, and men are talking about taxes. Then as a mysterious black box comes before the crowd, there is a sense of hesitancy and maybe even fear as villagers keep their distance and do not volunteer to facilitate the event alongside Mr. Summers, the organizer of many town festivities.
We're introduced to a group of families in this town. One of which is the Hutchinson's. Mrs. Hutchinson runs late to the lottery and, as it is a very small town, her presence is missed. She makes light of the situation with jokes and appears to be either well-liked or charismatic enough to garner laughs from the town.
Eventually, the town must go household by household and draw names - seeing which family is chosen for the lottery. Guess who's chosen: The Hutchinsons.
Mrs. Hutchinson immediately cries that the process was not fair. Other town members respond that it was, and everyone had the same amount of chance to be chosen.
The crowd is tense, but the head of the household, Bill Hutchinson obeys the ritual. The rest of his - household - his wife and three children (aged from adolescent to teenager) - must draw amongst themselves for the second round of the lottery.
The children are safe with blank slips of paper. As is Bill. Mrs. Hutchinson, however, has a black circle in the middle of her paper.
There are more cries from Mrs. Hutchinson that the process was not fair. Her pleas are not meant with sympathy, as everyone in the town - from kids to elders - begin picking up rocks and throwing them at her. She is hit in the temple but the stoning continues.
Upon rereading, I found the juxtaposition between the mundanity of the town's activities with the unusualness of the town's form of population control incredibly startling. "The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen-age club, the Halloween program." I read this thinking, "Um... one of these things is not like the other!" It's chilling how an otherwise disturbing social practice can be normalized. It takes me back to my fascination with socialization, especially as a means of social control.
As I mention in my reviews of Brave New World, How to be an Antiracist, and heck, even The Four Agreements, socialization is a synonym for social conditioning. It's how one becomes accustomed to the norms of a society, so much so that the norms are enforced by others to ensure complicity and conformity.
In the case of "The Lottery", social conditioning is almost too obvious a theme. From Old Man Warner saying "'there's always been a lottery'" to no one batting an eye at stoning their neighbor, friend, or family member to death. The tradition had been conditioned into the townspeople so much that resisting was not an option.
Mrs. Hutchinson had resisted conditioning, but only as a survival instinct once her life was threatened. And even then, she did not practice extreme measures to escape the situation (though I'm not sure how practicable an option that would have been, given she was outnumbered). She eventually submitted to being stoned.
"The Lottery" also nicely demonstrated not only the resistance to break those learned behaviors and beliefs but also the stronger resistance toward changing them. Even a subtle change to the ritual, such as updating the quality of the mysterious black box, was met with reluctance and inaction: "Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done."
This simple noting of the gradual changes made to this longstanding tradition made my mind reel. My major at USC closely examined how societal structures implemented social change - what worked and what didn't. Did leadership, policy, social norms, or other structures determine success or failure - and how may those impact future endeavors?
For a final note, it's interesting to consider what type of changes gain traction in society and which do not by using this town as a case study. What made the social conditioning so strong that a community could stone another and not so much blink an eye? This may sound outlandish at first glance, but social norms enforcing aggressive regimes are not unheard of in our reality. From Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany to maltreatment of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the oppression of Uyghurs in China. This type of social conditioning in favor of well-established thoughts and behavior, even (and especially) when directed against a particular group of people, is not such a distant reality at all.
You can read more about it in the Food For Thought section of Ramiah Reflects below and noodle on these questions for yourself. You can read the story here.
Ramiah Reflects
Food for Thought:
I have several questions based on the actions of Mr. Summer. Mr. Summer is shown to subtly change to the lottery over time in several ways - be it substituting paper slips for wood chips, not singing along with the introductory chant, or not saluting each head of household who draws from the mysterious black box.
Although the town had been socialized for decades to uphold the tradition, Mr. Summers was able to make changes - was he successful because they were incremental? Was it more the changes he made or how we made them that made him succeed in changing parts of the tradition?
Can radical change, like that of Mr. Adam's suggestion to completely abandon the lottery system, be accepted if presented more instantaneously?
Might Mr. Summer's strays from tradition be interpreted as gradual change that will eventually radically transform the lottery? Was his intent radical change?
Is radical change sustainable?
How much autonomy can be present within the constructs of socialization?
Ramiah's Re-read When
Re-read when:
You want a spooky take on social control
You want to consider what impacts receptiveness to social change
You want to enjoy one of my favorite short stories 👻
Check out my other posts and book notes here.
Until next time!
Montana Houston
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