608 Jacobs, Harriet
Indeed, the weather is pleasant, everyone is chit-
chatting, and even the subtle foreshadowing of
events to come—the fact that the boys are picking
smooth, flat rocks and putting them in their pock-
ets—is easily dismissed as an innocent activity that
one can expect in such a town. By the middle of the
story, however, it becomes clear that beneath the
veneer of happy small-town life resides a discontent
in the village. It is curious that Old Man Warner
admonishes those who would give up “The Lottery”
and Tessie becomes increasingly adamant that the
lottery is not fair. Significantly, we are not told why
some villages want to give up the lottery ritual, and
we struggle to determine just why someone would
not want to win a lottery, which usually results in
something good. The possibility of violence at this
point in the story is remote if not incredible; but,
drawn this far into the tale, we have been at least
initially primed for a modestly incongruous end-
ing. When we learn that Tessie is to be stoned to
death, and that all of the village—including her
husband and children—will participate, everything
we have assumed thus far is thrown into confusion.
The initially happy tone, which has slowly been
weakening to worry, finally erupts into horror. Our
presuppositions about family life, small-town living,
and good-neighborliness must struggle to reconcile
how we went from sunny day to vicious stoning.
This sneaky, gradual shift is accomplished, funda-
mentally, through a clever manipulation of tone by
the author.
The form of violence suggested by the end of
the story serves to punctuate this tonal inconsis-
tency with a giant exclamation point. Stoning is a
cultural practice that most Americans read about
only in books. It is exotic, terrible, and a brutal way
to die. Jackson could have just as easily ended the
story with Tessie drinking a painless, fast-acting
poison. Alternatively, she could have exiled Tessie
from the village or had her work for somebody else
as a servant for a year. The potential conclusions
were many, but the author decided upon a form of
extreme violence. Critically, this is not violence for
violence’s sake; Jackson is not simply trying to shock
us. While the strong suggestion of stoning is literally
violent, the figurative meaning of this violence ges-
tures beyond itself in ways that literary symbolism
typically does. The violence serves to draw attention
to the author’s deeper concerns about the possibly
deadly costs that follow from blindly following tra-
dition, and the impact of unfair social practices on
the individual. For a story that represents no actual
violence, “The Lottery” has the power to make us
imagine extreme harm enacted upon an individual,
thus serving to unsettle our common assumptions
about the contexts in which people harm others. If
we can get past the jolt of the violence that punctu-
ates the end of the story, we can begin to examine
the origins of our revulsion, and the power of fiction
to elicit such feelings.
David MichelsonjaCobS, HarriET Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
(1861)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written in
1861 by Harriet Jacobs and is the only novel-length
slave narrative by an African-American woman.
Unlike other slave narrators, Harriet Jacobs did not
publish the book under her own name, instead used
the pseudonym Linda Brent. It details the particular
brutalities faced by female slaves, particularly sexual
abuse, and is unique in that it addresses a specific
audience, white women in the North. As a young
girl, Linda is unaware of her status as a slave; her
father, Uncle William, and grandmother, Martha,
protect her. As she reaches adolescence, she is con-
stantly harassed by Dr. Flint, her owner, and Mrs.
Flint, his wife. The narrative describes Dr. Flint
whispering sexually explicit remarks to Linda and
accosting her sexually; Mrs. Flint recognizes her
husband’s sexual pursuit of Linda and becomes
increasingly more abusive toward her. The only
person Linda can turn to is her grandmother. When
Linda wants to marry another slave, Dr. Flint denies
her request; in a final attempt to be free of his tor-
ments, she decides to have two children, Ellen and
Benny, with Mr. Sands, a white politician. Dr. Flint
attempts to use her children to get her to submit to
him; rather than run away and leave her children,
Brent spends seven years hiding in the garret over
her grandmother’s house. During that time, her
grandmother takes care of her, and she and her fam-