America

Order Description American towns do not engage in an annual sacrificial rite of stoning In a well-crafted piece of writing, ~500 words in length, answer the following question and post your reply to the discussion board. Be sure to draw on the lesson notes and the concrete details of the story. Clearly, American towns do not engage in an annual sacrificial rite of stoning. At the literal level, the story is not representing reality. Of course, we regularly hear of violent incidents where an individual—for “reasons” of sex, race, religion, lifestyle—are singled out by a group and violently attacked, even killed. But Jackson is pointing to a more institutionally organized and sanctioned kind of violence. Given that the annual stoning is a fictive, imaginative event (though with historical precedents, like the pharmakos rites of ancient Greece), in what ways does it depict truths and realities about American (more broadly western) culture? Do we learn something about ourselves, our society and culture, through this story? If so, what? Read The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, available at The New Yorker website: https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf The Complicit Reader In The Lottery, Jackson invites the reader into a Norman Rockwell-like, all-American New England village, before pulling the rug out with an act of horrific violence. In the tale, villagers gather together in the central square of an unnamed village for an annual lottery. There is much excitement and interest surrounding the event, which we can call a rite, since it has ritual dimensions—it ends in a sacrifice. Discussion of everyday life and happenings is intermingled with a bit of history about the lottery, and traditional and modern versions are compared. We learn about the particulars of this year’s lottery, and finally the winning family is selected, and from that family, a single member—Mrs. Hutchinson, who is summarily stoned to death by the villagers, including her family. After publication of the story, Jackson publically stated that the model of the village and village life in the story was North Beddignton, Vermont, where she and her husband had lived for many years. Certainly she was not referring in any literal sense to an annual rite practiced by the villagers of North Beddington; but she was suggesting a violence that underlay the foundations of her liberal, middle class world. The narrative, though simple, is masterful. It invites readers—in particular, the gentrified readership of the New Yorker Magazine in which the piece was first published—into an act of identification with the villagers, thus making the reader complicit in the act of scapegoating that eventuates in the stoning of Mrs. Hutchinson. Many readers of the story actually wind up feeling manipulated. Did your reading provoke any such emotions? In the podcast discussion between A.M. Homes and Debora Triesman, they devote quite some time to the story’s aesthetic features, the techniques used to draw the reader in, which generates the sense of shock at the end.