阐释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
1672-1578（2012)06-0005-03
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 satiied in the socialized world, human being has to be selfish. Otherwise, he will miss the opportunity and get trapped in an unforable situation. Gradually, selfishness pervades the biological gene as well as the social gene and influences his thought and behior.
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 he 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.The inevitability of Sin does not mean that people take it for grounded and conduct it at will. On contrary, the consequences brought by Sin frighten the Sinners and warn them. Theoretically, among many primitive peoples it was believed that the nature was a living body. Human being’s consistent violent deprival of vegetable life without payments would lessen natural and human productivity and even bring blight and disease to the land and its people. “Only by tranerring the corruptions of the tribe to a sacred animal or person, then by killing this scapegoat, the tribe could achieve the cleansing and atonement thought necessary for natural and spiritual rebirth.” (Guerin, 169) Knowing this, it is easy for us to understand why Old Man Warner reproached the Adams for talking about giving up the lottery. The former should be an archetype of the Wise Old Man. Ironically, Warner represented “knowledge, reflection, insight, wisdom, cleverness, and intuition on the one hand, and on the other, moral qualities such as goodwill and readiness to help, which make his ‘spiritual’ character sufficiently plain.” He was well associated with the saying “Lottery in June, corn be hey soon”. And he could be the only one capable of warning the revenge of God: if the lottery were canceled, they would “go back to living in the ces” and “eat stewed chickweed and acorns” (Jackson). These alarms enlightened the Adams so much that they resolutely advanced before the crowd at the moment of stoning Tessie to death so as to correct their errors and make a fresh start.
To prevent the tribe or nation from disasters, to calm and pacify the angry nature or the indignant God, and to compensate for their inevitable Sin, many primitives took various sacred rites in which they offered sacrifices, including grains in the field (mainly in an agricultural society), hunted animals (mainly in a nomadic society), and even human beings. According to Frazer, the rites of blood sacrifice and purification were considered by ancient peoples as a magical guarantee of rejuvenation, an assurance of life, both vegetable and human (Golden Bough). And forms like the procedures of rites and the sacrifices are inherited (through either external factors as most anthropologists pointed out or the structure of the psyche itself as Jung insisted) and passed down from one generation to the next. The most notable sacrifice is recorded in Genesis 22: “Abraham saw a sheep fixed by its horns in the brushwood: and Abraham took the sheep and made a burned offering of it in place of his son”(Bible). And this is the literal origin of the scapegoat.Surely, human sacrifice strikes us as incredibly primitive. And if it happens in our civilized world, a striking relevance will be achieved just like what has been brought about by Jackson’s short story. It was a village with tractors, post office and other modern facilities. Nevertheless, these modern things did not enlighten villagers to give up the sage thoughts or lessen their cruelty. Rather, everybody participated in the selection for a human sacrifice and killing of this scapegoat. The numbness and cruelty exposed in the process versus the modernity of the village give us a sharp contrast and force us to think over the irrationality.
To some degree, many people believe that to some extent collective crime is not a crime. The participation in Sin of all the people in a tribe usually does not get punishment from themselves because human being is a selfish species and thus tends to be good to himself and severe to others. In the story, this idea is proved by everybody’s participation in defending the result of the lottery and killing Tessie voluntarily. When the crowd knew that it was the Hutchinson family that had get the ticket, Tessie shouted to resist. But the crowds resolutely safeguarded the result through disagreement of people from all walks of life. Mrs. Delacroix, a common house wife, called, “Be a good sport, Tessie.” and Mrs. Gres, the wife of a governor, said politically that “all of us took the same chance” (Jackson). It is natural that Tessie’s sisterhood ge her advice and persuasion. But this natural thing strikes us more severely for the numbness of the woman figures, who had not realized their miserable fate and even helped the rulers to suppress the victim. Her husband Bill, the one who should he given her comfort and support, felt regretful for her “shameful” shouting and immediately ordered her to shut up. So the love of husband and wife is totally insignificant in front of the collective. And when the final result came out but the lucky candidate refused to show her paper, Bill again played the role of cruel husband. He “went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand” (Jackson). Mr. Summers, the one who held the economy of the village and projected square dances, teenage club and the Halloween program like an officer, “had time and energy to devote to civic activities” (Jackson). He was a reformer who succeeded in persuading the folks to have slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood and proposed frequently about making a new box. However, no matter how much reforming spirits he boasted, he never had the awareness of abolishing the primitive lottery. More regrettably, this politician guy did not sympathize for the victim and hurried the process impersonally—“that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurry a little more to get it done in time” (Jackson). Finally, all the folks, male and female, young and old, common people and the authority, voluntarily threw the early prepared stones to Tessie. And the collective violence eventually put Mrs. Hutchinson to death.