A Feministic View on Jackson’s Short Stories ‘the Lottery’ and ‘the Tooth’

Shirley Jackson is most famous for her short story ‘The Lottery’ and her novel ‘The Haunted House’. She has been applauded for her fresh approach towards American Gothic writing. There are many works dedicated to the gothic elements her stories contain. However, most critics overlooked the feminist elements that most of her stories have. The two short stories discussed in this essay both have female characters who are outsiders in their society. Careful examination of the protagonists’ course of action, setting, and symbolic references Shirley Jackson put in both of the stories shows that the female protagonist in both ‘The Lottery’ and ‘The Tooth should be considered as a woman with a feminist attitude towards a male-dominated society. The first short story which will be discussed is ‘The Lottery’. The second story to be discussed is ‘The Tooth’. In order to get a clear view on why these two short stories can in fact be considered stories with a feminist message, this essay will first of all explain what feminist theory consists of and how this theory applies to short stories.
Feminist theory examines and critiques the relations of power that are defined in and through the sex/gender system that “unnaturally” differentiates women from men. The feminist view on this problematic system of power, which privileges men while denying women legal and political equality and sexual freedom, has shifted over time. Different theorists of feminism reflect the changing times, histories, and varied conceptions of women's power and oppression (Eisenstein Z, 2001). Feminist theory did not only change people’s view on social aspects of our society, but it also changed the way people looked at literature. This form of criticism is called feminist criticism. Feminist criticism is a critical approach that started in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist criticism stated that literary study had been so dominated by men that it contained many “male-produced” assumptions. Feminist

Cited: Jackson, S, The Lottery, and other stories. New York: Fassar, Straus and Giroux, 1948 Secondary Sources: Calloway, Catherine. “Fiction: the 1930s to the 1960s” American Literary Scholarship Sep. 2003: 22pp. 2 Mar. 2007 Griffin, Amy Margolin, Uri. “Telling in the plural, from grammar to ideology.” Poetics today 2000: 37 pp. 2 Mar. 2007 Pascal, Richard Yarmove, Jay A.”Jackson’s The Loterry” The Explicator 1994: 4 pp. 1 Apr. 2007 Zillah Eisenstein "Feminist Theory" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e