Lottery by Shirley Jackson Is Term Paper

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Tessie's rebellion, writes Kosenko, beings with her late arrival at the lottery, a faux pas that raises suspicions of her resistance to everything that the lottery stands for (Kosenko pp). By choosing Tessie Hutchinson as the lottery's victim and scapegoat, Jackson reveals the lottery to be an ideological mechanism that serves to defuse the average villager's deep, inarticulate dissatisfaction with the social order in which he lives by channeling it into anger directed at the victims of that social order (Kosenko pp).

Tessie's next social faux pas or unconscious act of rebellion comes when their name is drawn, and she says, "Get up there, Bill" (Jackson pp). Kosenko writes that in doing this, Tessie "inverts the power relation that holds in the village between husbands and wives...her remark evokes nervous laughter from the crowd, which sense the taboo that she has violated" (Kosenko pp). And then, according to Kosenko, Tessie's final faux pas is to question the rules of the lottery which relegate women to inferior status as the property of their husbands (Kosenko pp). When Mr. Summers asks Bill Hutchinson whether his family has any other households, Tessie yells, "There's Don and Eva.... Make them take their chance," however, Mr. Summers reminds her, "Daughters draw with their husbands' families" (Kosenko pp). Thus, power in the village is exclusively consolidated into the hands of male heads of families and households, and women are disenfranchised (Kosenko pp).

Kosenko suggests that Tessie is a woman whose role as a housewife deprives her of her freedom by forcing her to submit to a husband who gains his power over her by virtue of his place in the workforce, however, Tessie "rebels against her role, and such rebellion is just what the orderly functioning of her society cannot stand" (Kosenko pp).

All of these faux pas set Tessie up as the lottery's likeliest victim, although they do not explicitly challenge the lottery (Kosenko pp). Tessie's rebellion is entirely unconscious, and is revealed by her cry while being stoned by the villagers, "It isn't fair" (Kosenko pp).

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Tessie is like the majority of the villagers, she does not object to the lottery per se, only to her own selection as its scapegoat, and Jackson gives the impression that if someone else had been selected, Tessie would have been just fine with the outcome (Kosenko pp).

According to Kosenko, the crowd's nervous laughter is ambivalent and expresses uncertainty about the validity of the taboos that Tessie breaks (Kosenko pp). However, ultimately these rebellious impulses are channeled by the lottery and its attendant ideology away from their proper objects, which are capitalism and capitalist patriarchs, into anger at the rebellious victims of capitalist social organization, and like Tessie, the villagers cannot articulate their rebellion due to the massive force of ideology that stands in the way (Kosenko pp).

By holding up the slip, Bill Hutchinson reasserts his dominance over his wayward wife and simultaneous transforms her into a symbol to others of the perils of disobedience (Kosenko pp).

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