Primitivity, Irrationality, Insanity – Demons in Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson's horror stories, “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, reflect the secularization of the modern, twentieth century which produced them. These works lack the overt supernatural: no vampire lurks in the gothic Hill House waiting to sup on the blood of innocent, defenseless women; no demon walks among the villagers in “The Lottery,” slowly concocting their damnation. Yet, despite this departure from such earlier elements of the genre, Jackson's stories are horrifying. Evil merely takes a different form in “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House: rather than being embodied in a figure external to and opposing the protagonists, evil is disembodied, an aspect of the mind and of human nature, emanating from the protagonists themselves – from their individual and collective psyches. In particular, Jackson explores group dynamics, ritual culture, and the human tendency to create – and the necessity of creating – dreams and stories by which to live. Underlying all of these, however, is a latent primitivity, irrationality, insanity – which, in the modern age of anxiety, godlessness, and self-fragmentation and -doubt, is, indeed, truly horrifying.

What strikes most readers about “The Lottery” is the sheer normality of the villagers: the children play, the men talk of “planting and rain, tractors and taxes” (1), and the women, in their “house dresses and sweaters...[exchange] bits of gossip” (1). By juxtaposing this apparent normality against the inhuman crime which the villagers commit, Jackson demonstrates the superficiality of what appears real and significant. In “The Lottery,” the things we base our lives upon and hope will hold up against evil – family, friendships – disintegrate into it. Jackson allows us to get a sense of what seems to be the villagers' tight-knit and warm community: when Mrs. Hutchinson arrives late, for example, we get a snippet of her comfortable conversation with Mrs. Delacroix before “the people [separate] good-humoredly to let her through” (2). The village thus seems like one of friends – except that it is difficult to describe them as such when they turn on one of their own. Mrs. Delacroix, in fact, who is the only woman we see Mrs. Hutchinson interact with, and with whom she does so in a decidedly friendly and familiar fashion, is among the first to turn on Mrs. Hutchinson, and does so with horrifying enthusiasm: “Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. 'Come on,' she said. 'Hurry up'” (7). Family, too, is something Jackson draws attention to, only to show it falling apart at the end of the story, when little Davy Hutchinson (along with the other Hutchinsons, presumably) advances towards his mother with pebbles in his hands. In the village, to say the least, appearances are deceiving.

In The Haunting of Hill House, too, reality is shown to be a fabrication. Eleanor altogether constructs what she presents as her life; when she tells Theo about her house, all the little details – the “white curtains..., little stone lions..., and...white cat” (64) – are things she noticed or imagined on her way to Hill House. As in “The Lottery” her relationships fall into patterns that suggest a superficial intimacy: for example, as critic Laura Miller has noted, Theo and Eleanor bond much the same way little girls do when they first meet (xvii), planning picnics, swapping various details about their lives, and finally deciding that they must be related (Jackson 38-39). They quickly become apparent best friends - “'Would you let them separate us now? Now that we've found out we're cousins?'” Theo asks Eleanor (38) – but as in “The Lottery,” Jackson invites us to recognize how quickly that veil of friendship disintegrates. The novel hints at Eleanor's latent dislike for Theo, akin to Mrs. Delacroix's dormant antipathy toward Mrs. Hutchinson: “[Eleanor] had never felt such uncontrollable loathing for any person before,” the novel states (116). Thus, in The Haunting of Hill House, as in “The Lottery,” Jackson demonstrates that the relationships, conversations, and activities that constitute daily life are fabricated and false. Eleanor's life is a series of fantasies that act as a veil. Hill House itself is a symbol of the deceptiveness of what we perceive as reality: the house does not look it, but it is ever so slightly off balance.

This – that what we perceive as reality is in fact not real at all – is disconcerting in and of itself. But Jackson's horror is more poignant: it explores what it is that our constructed realities are veiling and in so doing uncovers the primitive and irrational foundations of our lives - foundations which we strive to – but, as Jackson's works suggest, cannot - mask, ignore, forget, or transcend. In The Haunting of Hill House, this underlying irrationality is represented by the house itself. Critics and commentators often suggest that the house represents the irrational mind; as Stephen King notes in his informal discussion on the novel in Danse Macabre, “Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman” (305). If we accept the compelling interpretation taken by King (and many others) that the hauntings in Hill House are not caused by actual ghosts but by telekinetic manifestations of Eleanor's psyche (King 307-308), the house becomes a symbol specifically of Eleanor's mind. The hauntings, then, can be traced back to Eleanor's childhood; they mimic the raining stones incident that occurred in her pubescent years. The hauntings thus derive from both the irrationality and unconscious narcissism of childhood and the explosive sexuality of the teenage years. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the hauntings are a manifestation of Eleanor's id, which, because she could not develop her individual self properly in her suppressive role as the passive and dutiful daughter, Eleanor could never properly subdue under a developed ego.

Eleanor's fantasies which she passes off as reality most literally are meant to veil something she lacks; she does not have a house of her own, for example, so she imagines one. Horror fiction author Anne Rivers Siddons has this to say regarding the symbol of the house:

[A] house is so much more than that...to most of us anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of our selves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. (King 287).

In creating a fantasy home and passing it off as reality, then, Eleanor is not only hiding the fact that she does not have a home, but more significantly, she is veiling the fact that she does not have an identity, a developed ego, a fixed thing to call “I.” Her attempts to create an identity for herself throughout the novel – by creating superficial relationships, for example, or by colouring her life with fairy-tale beliefs such as “journeys end in lovers meeting” - are futile, furthermore; her gradual appropriation by Hill House symbolizes, thus, her gradual reduction to nothing but her irrationality, her childishness.

The psychoanalytical concepts of the id and the ego are relevant in interpreting “The Lottery” as well. It is evident that within the village, there is a disturbing disjunct between what is presented on the surface (a village full of friendly, ordinary people) and what lies underneath (a mob of violent murderers): in a sense, the village itself has a civilized ego and a primitive id. It is significant, in this respect, that the children are the first to gather for the annual stoning; children are the most primitive members of society, those who have subdued their ids least of all. The ritual of the lottery itself is primitive, in fact; one may speculate that it has evolved from some kind of ancient fertility ritual: it takes place around the time of the summer solstice, in midsummer, like many pagan festivities; it demands a human sacrifice; furthermore, it has a superstitious basis: “'Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in june, corn be heavy soon,'” as Old Man Warner says (14).

While The Haunting of Hill House examines the irrational mind of the individual, “The Lottery” foregrounds the collective mind which, unfortunately, is no better. In Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, Freud argues the following regarding group dynamics:

The most remarkable and...important result of the formation of a group is the 'exaltation or intensification of emotion'...Men's emotions are stirred in a group to a pitch they they
seldom or never attain under other conditions; and it is a pleasurable experience for
those who are concerned to surrender themselves so unreservedly to their passions and
thus to become merged in the group and to lose the sense of the limits of individuality. (27)

Freud suggests, thus, that the collective mind is by its very nature regressive and primitive: “individuality” or ego fades away into the “'intensification of emotion'” - the id, in other words, becomes the driving force. His observations apply pertinently to “The Lottery” where it is as a unified mob, a collective “they,” that the villagers stone Mrs. Hutchinson, as the final lines of the story convey: “Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her” (7, emphasis mine). The irrationality we find in Eleanor is just as present among the villagers, despite the fact that the villagers act as a group while Eleanor cannot place herself successfully in a group: both demonstrate, as Freud calls it, “a regression in mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages or children” (82). Just as Eleanor “surrenders” to Hill House, the individual villagers surrender to the group mentality - which is to say that both Eleanor and the villagers surrender to irrationality and primitivity.

Part of what makes Jackson's tales so horrifying is her implication that this irrationality, rather than resting somewhere in the unconscious and rearing its head now and again, is something that is ever-present. The narrator of “The Lottery” lists the annual stoning ritual along with various other seemingly ordinary events and gatherings that mark the calendar throughout the year - “the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program” (1) – suggesting that perhaps these too (which exist even in our own societies) have some ritualistic, primitive basis. Similarly, Mr. Summers, the modern-pagan priest, not only conducts the lottery, but also presides over most other “civic activities” (1). All of these events take place at the Town Square which – if we accept the interpretation of the lottery as a primitive ritual – plays the role of the magic circle. Of course, the shift from a magic circle to a square in Jackson's story is significant: studies of religious and cult ceremonies have associated the circle with the “circular motion of heavenly bodies” (Aune 1790) – it represents the cyclicality and change of nature. In neopagan rites, the circle represents “the passing from one phase of life to another, and the shifting from one type of consciousness to another” (Pike 7829). The square, on the other hand, suggests nature's rigidity and entrapment. The villagers cannot escape their primitivity; it is at the heart of the village and spread throughout it.

One might argue that the story hints at a gradual movement away from primitivity: in some towns, the lottery is going out of fashion. Throughout the story, however, Jackson gives strong indications of the direction of sociocultural evolution, particularly through the character of Old Man Warner who, as the oldest denizen of the village, provides observations of the future through a perspective informed by the past. According to Old Man Warner, “It's not the way it used to be...people ain't the way they used to be” (6). We learn that certain other towns have given up the lottery; Warner, like many an old man today, blames the younger generation: “'Pack of crazy fools,' he said [of those considering giving up the lottery]...Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them” (4). This seems hopeful; future generations will become aware of the horrors of the lottery and put a stop to the primitive ritual. However, when we consider this possibility against the actual “young folk” depicted by Jackson in her story, the prediction loses credibility: the children are the most likely of all to give in to such primitivity. Old Man Warner also ironically claims that giving up the lottery is like “wanting to go back to living in caves” (4) – he truly believes that the lottery is, in fact, an indicator of advanced society, while, to the reader's outside perspective, it is apparent that the lottery preserves all the violence, fervour, irrationality, and superstition ascribed to primitive paganism. Thus, the novel is not hopeful about humanity: Jackson demonstrates its lack of progress and the impossibility of it transcending its own origins and foundations.

I began with the claim that Jackson's horror tales are unlike their predecessors because they lack, for example, vampires and demons; let me return to this assessment now. It is true that we never catch a glimpse of the Count Dracula in the halls of Hill House – but there is certainly something there preying upon Eleanor, who, with her undeveloped sense of self, is in many ways innocent and defenseless. And of course there are no discernible demons among the Joes, Steves, Nancies, and Janes of the village in “The Lottery,” but an early modern Christian, for example, would certainly recognize that the lottery is a demonic, pagan ritual. And after all, – vampires, monsters, ghosts, demons, werewolves, witches – what are these but symbolic representations of evil? And what is it we fear most of all? Dracula would not be frightening if he did not have the ability to transform us into bloodless, soulless beings incapable of being saved. Demons cannot damn those incapable of sinning. And so it is the evil within ourselves that horror has always explored – in the past, it has merely done so through externalized, supernatural, symbolic creatures. “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House present, thus, a new horror – the modern-secular – but also a very ancient horror. These works examine the fragility of the happy yet superficial realities we have created for ourselves through stories, friendships, dreams, and rituals. Jackson looks through the veil of these realities to uncover the primitivity and irrationality which underlie our day-to-day lives: she looks at the id buried in all of us, points it out and says 'There is violence; there is selfishness; there is rampant sexuality; there is hate.' According to Jackson, the demons are within and among us and they are just as frightening, if not more so, than those that lurk in Gothic castles or under our beds. 

SOURCES

Aune, David. “Circle.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. 2^nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 1790-1795. Gale Virtual Referenece Library. Web.

Freud, Sigmund. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. New York: Boni and Liveright, 192-. Scholars Portal Books. E-book.

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin Group, 2006.

---. “The Lottery.” 1948. The Middlebury Blog Network. 1-7. PDF File.

individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf>
King, Stephen. “Chapter IX: Horror Fiction.” Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books, 2010. 264- 310. Google Books. E-book.

Laura Miller. “Introduction.” The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. ix-xxii.
Pike, Sarah M. “Rites of Passage: Neopagan Rites.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. 2^nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Macmillan Referenece USA, 2005. 7828-7831. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web.