Social Order In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

In Shirley Jackson 's short story "The Lottery" she represents an average society with seemingly common order and widely developed traditions which everybody is forced or even glad to follow whatever they are. First we see how everybody has traditionally defined roles within the community: men, women and even children know well how they are expected to behave. Men are the dominating part; they have the right to make decisions for their families. Women have a subordinate position: they are supposed to "walk shortly after their menfolk" (328) and to work only at home. Children are involved in the social life and supposed to learn its traditions from an early age. A surprising thing is that nobody finds anything bad in this or tries to rebel. Afterwards, we see that full obedience to the social order leads to the support of the main tradition - the annual ritual of choosing a "winner" in the
and Mrs. Adams. Being afraid to say openly that the lottery itself is wrong, they are talking about other villages which quit lotteries. But after the victim is chosen, there are already three people who find the ritual unfair. Tessie Hutchinson, "the winner" of the lottery, realizes that it 's wrong just after the tradition of the lottery affected her. The same happens every time in our real life: we don 't mind something just until it strikes us. We might see others suffer and still do nothing to change it. Even though other traditional foundations in this story are not so bloody, it 's still notable that everyone 's roles are defined by these unwritten laws. Women silently agree that they should "belong" to their husbands and family and shouldn 't work outside the house. Men, seeming to be on top of social hierarchy, still have no rights against social norms of their community. Overall obedience and inaction bears traditional order which bonds everything and extinguishes