Shirley Jackson, My Mother and a Story That Rocked My World
"The Lottery" has chilled me for a lifetime. Meet the teacher who cracked it open--my brilliant mother.
When my mother was 40 and running out of hope that a Radcliffe PhD would ever get her hired by the University of New Hampshire, the gatekeepers offered her a night-school class at Pease Air Force Base. The English department, to a man, wouldn’t touch that gig. My mother grabbed it. “Why don’t you come along?” she asked me. “Wait till you see the first story I’ve chosen. You won’t read anything like it in that hidebound school of yours. It’ll lift off the top of your head.”
Almost 13, I disdained outings with my mother. This one was different, my chance to be treated like a grownup. All I had to do was come prepared. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” whispered sweetly to me as not-quite-rightness pinned me to my seat and came in for the kill with an exquisitely shocking final sentence. How would my mother—baker of pies, keeper of bedtimes, editor of middle-school homework—make sense of this?
“The Lottery” is one year older than I am, 76 this month. When The New Yorker published it in the issue of June 26, 1948, readers wrote in droves—some to cancel their subscriptions, others to opine on the writer’s intent (theories ranged from Communist propaganda to reporting from a crime scene). Jackson later said “The Lottery” came to her as she pushed her toddler’s stroller up a hill in North Bennington, Vermont, her model for the fictional New England village that practices ritual sacrifice.
My mother identified with Shirley Jackson—like her, a faculty wife, albeit on a higher plane. Shirley’s husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was a celebrated literary critic who taught at Bennington College while his wife rode herd on their brood of four. Max Maynard was the lowest-paid professor of English at the UNH; my mother hosted his students with homemade shortbread. She must have started teaching night school in the fall of 1962, four months before Betty Friedan exposed “the problem with no name” in The Feminine Mystique.
Sometimes my mother would tell me of the academic medals she’d won, the praise showered on her by distinguished scholars, the rapt students she had taught at Wellesley before casting her lot with my father. Here she goes again, I would think, rolling my eyes.
My mother’s students at Pease Air Force Base had come to class directly from their drills, in sweat-stained fatigues with chest hair bursting from their undershirts. A far cry from the Wellesley girls, they sat with their legs apart like cowboys on imaginary horses. The only other female student, somebody’s young wife in a sweater set and pearls, leaned forward on her elbows. “Well, Dr. Maynard, you sure picked a corker. That last sentence: ‘…and then they were upon her.’ What was that all about?”
My mother smiled, the keeper of shivery surprises. “You mean you weren’t expecting ritual murder in this class? A happy housewife stoned to death by her neighbors?”
The story had lifted the top off everyone’s head. My mother sensed it. She strode among the metal chairs like a queen through her kingdom of words. “Shirley Jackson tears the Norman Rockwell façade off small-town life to reveal what lies beneath—an evil older than the graveyard and as close as the back fence.
“This evil doesn’t announce itself with screams or spurting blood. For that you can catch a double bill at the drive-in. Look at the opening images. Warm sunny day, green grass, all those flowers. You half-expect some loveable geezer to start singing, ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ The writer lines up her details like a teacup collection, the better to shock you in the end. Every lottery has a winner—in this case a housewife named Tessie Hutchinson. You might think she’s about to snag a brand new washer, and what is her rich reward? A stoning in the town square. A neighbor handing pebbles to Tessie’s own little boy. No one is innocent here.”
To me she was the lesson as well as the teacher—the most enthralling teacher I could imagine.
Something had burst forth in my mother, something shiny and lush and brave. The men followed every toss of her black hair, every swivel of her hips under the new tweed sheath. To me she was the lesson as well as the teacher—the most enthralling teacher I could imagine. She paused for dramatic effect. “So let’s talk about the victim. Why a woman? And why this particular woman, Tessie Hutchinson?”
“There has to be a reason?” This from a pimple-flecked airman who looked at most 16. “Maybe Shirley just needed to wrap things up. She could have picked anyone. Kapow!”
“Oho! Feeling cocky today, I see! Now, I wonder what would happen if you flew your plane hither and yon without a reason. You might get shot down over Russia. Kapow, indeed!”
The woman in the pearls offered insights that sounded like questions. “You know something’s up because she’s late for the lottery? She says she didn’t want to leave her dirty dishes for her husband to find? And it’s so sad because she tried to do the right thing and she’ll never wash another dish again?” Blank looks from the men. Who’d be sad about dishes?
I put up my hand. “The men in this town run the lottery the way they run everything else. The women don’t have any power. Tessie’s a bit of a rebel. I bet she hated washing dishes. That’s why she’s late for the lottery. She’s the perfect victim because she broke the rules.” Heads nodded all around. I could outdo these grownups. “But I wouldn’t call it sad, what happens to Tessie. She’s not exactly sweetness and light. She’d like to see her own daughter stoned in her place.” I took a deep breath. “The right thing would be stopping the lottery. And that’s not going to happen.”
My mother looked at me with grave pride. Then she laughed. “I swear I didn’t coach her!”
An hour flew by. We must have talked about Auschwitz, a recent memory then, and Senator Joe McCarthy’s list of so-called traitors to America. My mother must have quoted the King James Bible: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.” Alongside grownups who paid bills and chased after kids, I was learning that one story could hold all the evil in the world. The airmen would have talked the evening away, but my father was waiting for his dinner. Outside night was falling. Shirley Jackson and my mother had lit fireworks in my brain, and the brilliance confounded me. My mother had been telling the truth about her lost teaching career. If anything, she’d downplayed her powers. I had to say it: “You were magnificent.”
This essay draws on three sources: Ruth Franklin’s terrific biography, Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life, Jackson’s own essay “Biography of a Story” and my first memoir, My Mother’s Daughter, where much of the dialog appears. I don’t recall the actual words that framed my mother’s feminist take on the story but will never forget her voice. The “kapow” quip is pure Fredelle Maynard, and writing it brought her back to me. For a more playful look at Fredelle, see “Love, Sex and the Cleaning Woman,” one of my most popular posts here.
Okay, on to the fun part. Were you ever enthralled by a literary work because a great teacher cracked it open? Is “The Lottery” part of your life as a reader? I wonder who’ll jump in first. Getting to know you through your comments is among the great joys of my week.
If I’m among your great joys and you are feeling flush, you might consider a paid subscription. Just planting the thought in case now is the moment. Either way, I’m honored and thrilled to have you here, keeping me on my game.
Rona, how I love your tiny touches: “cast her lot with my father”, for one.
As you know, my sister Lucy had the great advantage of your mother’s adjunct classes at Dover High in the 1960’s. My mother idolized yours, even though their relationship consisted of barely more than pleasantries at our farm stand as your mother selected her strawberries. My mother often lamented that by the time I hit high school Fredelle was no longer there, inspiring and fascinating her students. My mom, like yours, scorned the hidebound education that I’d have to endure sans Dr. Maynard.
(In my senior year in Honors English I attempted to write a spare, Hemingway-esque story. I made mention of birds in a tree. My teacher edited it to read “robins trilling”. It’s about all I remember about that teacher).
My mother, Joan, was a whip-smart adventurous Boston girl who aspired to be a pilot. Not long after her first solo flight in a Piper Cub (which included an emergency landing on Revere Beach), she met my father, a handsome Harvard-educated New Hampshire farmer. A shotgun wedding ensued just before she turned 19. Not once did I hear her lament the life she might have had. That’s what those women did: they accepted their lot. They baked amazing pies and taught night classes, like Fredelle, or smilingly sold vegetables by day and devoured books by night, like Joan.
How much must have been bursting in them, though, just under their skin? I wish I’d appreciated her more.
Love this one, Rona. On several levels. Your mother as a teacher, you witnessing your mother as a teacher, your mother witnessing you as a student, your precocious take on the story... I'm envious of this memory, of the two of you seeing each other's minds. I don't remember how old I was when I first read The Lottery, but I do remember being absolutely freaked out by it. The story pulsed in my brain for the longest time (it still pulses now, I see)--I had never read anything that scared me before. I remember being absolutely shocked. I remember wanting to rewrite it, to stop those people! I thought, can't she just cross out this ending and rewrite it? Oh, the power of the written word! Walking around the world after reading that story, seeing everything differently, and realizing the power another person can have over you, if you let them in. Because nothing was changed, not really, and yet everything was changed.