The Core Archetype of The Lottery

The Core Archetype of The Lottery

Abstract：Shirley Jackson’s famous work The Lottery is an archetypal tragedy, with Sin as the core. This essay explains Sin in The Lottery and analyzes the story from an archetypal approach, finding collective violence is a kind of Sin which should be extinct in modern age.

Key words：The Lottery; Sin; archetype; collective violence Shirley Jackson’s famous work The Lottery deserves the name of tragedy mainly because of Sin. Had not Sin worked, Mrs. Hutchinson would not face her death and the villagers would not conduct a disaster in person. It follows that Sin is the core of the whole story and knitted through different parts of the work.

As Jackson implied in The Lottery, human being has the potential of conducting Sin. He fears it and its consequences but cannot get rid of it. He chooses a scapegoat to burden his Sin, wishing to get forgiven. But the program of choosing a living human scapegoat inevitably leads to a much severer Sin—collective violence.

In this story, Jackson elaborated the proposition in two facets. Human being cannot evade Sin because of his selfishness. In order to survive in a harsh natural world and get satisfied in the socialized world, human being has to be selfish. Otherwise, he will miss the opportunity and get trapped in an unfavorable situation. Gradually, selfishness pervades the biological gene as well as the social gene and influences his thought and behavior.

Villagers’ words, attitude and actions in the process of the rite illustrate selfishness. After all the living and healthy folks came to the square and the remains of the ritual and procedures had been done, the lottery of life importance formally began. When the host Mr. Summers was declaring the rules of the scapegoat-choosing game, villagers “only half listened to the directions” (Jackson) because they were very much familiar with the regulations. And the greater the terror and fear were, the more eagerly the candidates wished someone else to have the luck. In other words, the nervousness could be seen as the symptom of selfishness. Generally speaking, human being exposes himself fully and truly in imminent danger. Were he loving and kind, he would face death nobly and do good to others for the last time. But were he selfish and vicious in nature, he would fear to die and clutch at any straw to survive. No better example but Tessie’s case could illustrate this idea.Having realized the lottery would never restart the first round, Tessie yelled to propose another suggestion. She wanted her daughter and son-in-law to join her household in the second round. “Make them take their chance!”(Jackson) It is widely accepted that the love of mother is the most unselfish and purest one. If she were a Good Mother, regardless of the irrationality of the lottery, she should shade her kids in her protection and substitute them as a human sacrifice. But Tessie did not have the consciousness of saving others from danger and death. She was the embodiment of selfishness. The basic instinct for life in unconsciousness wholly controlled her body and soul and made her resemble the archetype of the Terrible Mother, a figure “associated with fear, danger, darkness and death” (Guerin, 163). She continued resisting and called for a restart. But her

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