Due to my CNN debut debacle, I sadly had to miss our last literary criticism class, along with the great "The Lottery" debate. Unable to join the discussion, I figured our final paper was my chance to "write now, or forever hold your peace." Of course, while "peace" is probably the last word most people would use to describe Shirley Jackson's short masterpiece, "prophecy" (of one of our society's greatest moral tragedies) may become one of "The Lottery's" greatest legacies, whether Jackson intended it to be or not.
Like war, the evil of human sacrifice has been with us since the beginning of time. However, unlike war, the destruction of innocent human beings, often performed for the purpose of appeasing the gods, has even from ancient times brought moral opposition, including when the Lord Himself stepped in to prevent Abraham from "offering up" his own son Issac (Genesis 22:1-18). Surely one might argue that in 1948, when Jackson published this disturbing short-story, human sacrifice (at least in civilized societies) was no longer taking place, so Shirley's tale must have been a metaphor for the shaft US women were getting in post-war America (especially in their loss of WWII jobs), or written to alert us to the fact that despite our defeat of Hitler, death was still the usual prospect for anyone in Russia or Yugoslavia who opposed the brutal dictatorships of Stalin or Tito. In other words, while Jackson's story no doubt made the short-story canon because it fulfilled all ten of Donald Hall's criteria for good literature, it would not have fulfilled "To Read Literature's" #2 statement of being "NOT predictable" if human sacrifice was still present in post-war America. But is it possible that Jackson foresaw a new "slaughter of the innocents" (Matt 2:16-18) whose seeds, while barely planted in 1948, took root in 1973, and came to fruition just this past weekend?
Although the word "abortion" was barely a whisper in 1948, there were those who predicted as soon as the Lambert Conference ruling in 1930, that its legal future was inevitable. When the Anglican Church became the first Christian denomination to allow artificial birth control at that conference, it was not just the Catholic Church but Church of England literary giants such as T.S. Elliot who voiced their opposition. "The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized, but non-Christian society," Elliot wrote in response to Lambert. "The experiment will fail ... but we must be patient in awaiting its collapse." This "non-Christian" society, complete with stoning one randomly selected villager for the sake of a bountiful harvest, is certainly alive and well in Jackson's little town. But it is the parallels between this town's attitude toward the lottery and our nation's current attitudes toward abortion that to me are most scary ...
While I was no doubt "freaked out" when I first read "The Lottery" as a teen, the pro-life question makes its message even more relevant to me today. Personally, my poem "The Blood of the Young Patriots" (a bit of a departure from "Stoned," wouldn't you say?) was my attempt to reconcile abortion with the post 9-11 patriotism of the country, but although it shares a surprise ending with Jackson's writing, it cannot capture her frightening subtlety. For example, while "Patriots" proclaims that his opponent accepts abortion, "Because these babies don't scream when their bodies fall," the villagers not only hear Mrs. Hutchinson's complaints, "It isn't fair, it isn't right," before the stoning, but hear her screams during the event. Pro-life activist Randall Terry picks up on this adult angle in his book A Humble Plea, where he uses the analogy of bishops (in Terry's eyes, the unborn's first line of defense) being murdered instead of babies. "Imagine your utter wretchedness," Terry says to the bishops, "if you were attacked and left for dead, and your 'pro-bishop' employee sees you but simply looks the other way, en route to her 'Bishop's Untimely Removal Pins' (BURP) meeting." Still, Jackson takes this analogy to an even higher level, for in her story, perhaps the ultimate victim of abortion is being silenced.
"It is a poverty," Mother Teresa warned, "to decide that a child must die so that you can live as you wish." This mentality is certainly at play in "The Lottery," where the few who have the strength to question its morality are drowned out out by the Old Man Warner faction and their old-boy "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon" philosophy. And, like the kids in the story, where the "feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them," today's youths, many of whom acknowledge that abortion is murder, also accept it unquestionably, for since Roe v Wade became law thirty six years ago, legal abortion is all they have ever known. But in Jackson's story, devastation is even more dramatic because the exact reversal of Mother Teresa's "The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, for it is a war on the innocent child, murder by the mother herself," prophecy is complete, for not only is the mother, not her child, being murdered, her own child ("The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles,") has a hand in it.
But as awful as this final image may be, the Jackson/abortion comparison wouldn't be complete without examining the cruel callousness of the husbands/fathers. Just as many, if not the majority, of young women have abortions not only because the counselor offers no "real" alternatives, but due to the fact that the baby's father is totally unsupportive and irresponsible, not only do Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves offer Tessie no other options, Mr. Hutchinson's opposition to his wife's objections are the most vile of all. "Shut up, Tessie," he silences her after the initial drawing, and later "forced the paper out of her hand" when the final pick has taken place, then "held it up and there was a stir in the crowd." While the recent story of Lacy Dodd, which I wrote about in my RenewAmerica commentary of the the Notre Dame/Obama invitation has a happy ending, the sad body of her tale of the unwed, pregnant college student (in this case at Notre Dame) is quite familar. Despite going alone to a women's clinic where abortion was the only realistic option, and dealing with an unsympathic boyfriend (a Notre Dame senior) who pressured her to make the abortion decision, telling Lacy that pro-life stuff was just "dining room talk ... when it's really you in the situation, it's different." In the end, Lacy did have the baby, but I wonder if her wonderful closing comment to Fr. Jenkins and President Obama, "Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk" would not only have won applause from the modern pro-life faction but from Jackson herself.
In all honesty, it is probably impossible to say what Shirley thought about the abortion question. While we do know ( from Wikipedia) that when "The Lottery" first was published in the New Yorker, it created a firestorm of reader-response criticism; not only was the story banned in South Africa, hundreds cancelled their magazine subscriptions, and the thousands of letters she received were almost universally negative, including one from her own mother which stated, "Dad and I did not care for [it]. This gloomy kind of story is all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?" In addition, while the fact that death by (illegal) abortion went down dramatically fron 1940 (1407 deaths) to 1950 (263 deaths) may have made the procedure more attractive to the culturally elite, Regina G. Kunzel notes in her book Fallen Woman, Problem Girls that to the typical unwed mother of the day, abortion was not considered an option. Since "social workers [of that era] had distanced themselves from the rhetoric of womanly benevolence," wrote Kunzel, "it is ironic that new psychiatric understanding dictated the proper role of the social worker [in this situation] to be that of 'the good mother,'" (pg. 168). Meanwhile, although Jackson never denied the significance of names such as "Delacroix" (meaning "of the cross") or "Hutchinson" (Anne Hutchinson was accused of "witchery" and banned from Massachusetts in 1638) to its symbolism, she stated the purpose of the story was simply "to shock the readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives." Still, the way the story came about suggests something quite different...
"I had written this story," said Shirley (see www.blitz21.com) "on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with ... no heavenly signs that my morning's work was not just another story. It came to me when I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller ... the hill was very steep and perhaps the efforts of the last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story." And so, while Jackson herself admits the strain of caring for her daughter had some bearing (at least on the tone) of the story, is it so far-fetched (from a psychoanalytic standpoint if nothing else) that Jackson's successful ascent of the hill with her daughter symbolized her uphill struggle back then to be taken seriously both as a female author and as a wife and mother? And, since Jackson was able to pass both tests with flying colors, could not "The Lottery" be her proof to her literary friends that, despite the trials each role entailed, the joy was far greater and thus abortion was not the answer?
After reading "The Blood of the Young Patriots" one day to a class at York, a courteous (and perhaps courageous, knowing the pro-choice slant of the administration) young woman gave a most insightful analysis of my poem. "The 9-11 victims of the terrorist attacks stuck in the buildings symbolize the babies in the womb that are about to be aborted, for both sets of victims are not only completely innocent, but are completely powerless to fight back." Of the countless critiques of "Patriots" I have received, this one remains the most poignant, not because it completely captured my intention (which it did) but because it did so by using a perfect analogy--one that had never occurred to me when I wrote it! Similarly, while Jackson may not have thought (at least consciously) about the abortion analogy when writing "The Lottery," the story is a perfect one not only to illuminate the modern pro-life stance, but to shock the opposition into seeing the real horror of their own pro-choice position.
POSTSCRIPT: Back in November of 2008, I caught on the Net (on a site dubbed "Real Catholic TV") a parable entitled "A Short Story." While its author, Michael Voris, admitted the parable was about the new Obama administration (and their pro-choice attitudes) I immediately thought about "The Lottery" when I first saw it ... even though I had not read the story since college! And so, although I re-read the story both for class and again for this paper, "A Short Story" no doubt deserves a lot of credit for its inspiration!
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