Comparing Dystopia In The Lottery And Harrison Bergeron

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, dystopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The genre of dystopia is clearly illustrated through the short stories of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the main character is suppressed of her freedom from doing anything, even writing. Because of her depression, her doctor husband, John, isolates her in a bedroom with a very odd, yellow wallpaper that takes over her physical and psychological state. Going into the new home, the woman is depressed, but stable.
At first, we as the readers have no idea what is going on and may believe the “The Lottery” is a good thing. It starts off with children gathering stones together while the adults go along with their normal day, but when that specific time of the day comes, things start to change. Their society’s leaders bring out a black box. In this black box are pieces of paper. Only one piece of paper contains a black dot. Each family in the town, pick one paper. When the name picking begins, the villagers get nervous. We as readers here see that something is not right. A villager even mentions how there is a town close by that ended the lottery, but an old man quickly disagreed and said that nothing will ever change. He has been apart of the lottery for the past seventy-seven years and it is simply tradition. It should remain unquestioned and the villagers need to be loyal to the lottery. As they come to the part where they pick the family, the suspense rises. Depending on how many family members there are, that is how many pieces of paper go back into the black box, which includes the paper with the black dot. That specific family draws again. The villagers get more anxious as they get closer to the end and the tone changes drastically. Luckily, the children did not get chosen, but the mother did. That meant that the mother had to get stoned by her own family and her own fellow
There is usually a group of people that lack awareness, but has at least one person that knows what is happening and knows what needs to be done. Independent thought simply do not exist in stories like these. Minds of individuals are controlled and thoughts are manipulated. A lot of times, current problems are taken to the extreme in these stories and are demonstrated in an intense way. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the subject of woman empowerment in our society is questioned. Whether it may be about woman roles in a household or in a job setting, feminists are still fighting for equal rights. Women are not the only individuals fighting for equality. There are also Latinos, African Americans, and homosexuals that are fighting for acceptance. In “Harrison Bergeron”, equality is being misunderstood as well. It does not matter what you may know or what you may look like, everyone should be given equal opportunity. As we see in all three of the stories, powerless individuals exist. In dystopian stories, we are presented with helpless people that we may not understand, but knowing the genre of the story help us better understand the author, the characters, and the societies that are being described. A dystopia is simply a society characterized by human