In Shirley Jacksons short story The Lottery, there is a yearly drawing in which a person of the village gets stoned to death, sacrificially, in order to receive better crops. The stoning is known as a ceremony to the people of the village. Once everyone has gathered in the town square, the head of the families choose a piece of paper. Whoever gets the paper that has a black dot on it means someone from that family will be picked to stoned. They then have only that family draw. This ceremony has been going on longer than the oldest person in the village has been alive. One of the main characters, Mrs. Hutchinson, ends up being the one to draw the paper and this story seems to be about her experience and thoughts about it.
Mrs. Hutchinson stands out right from the beginning of the story. She arrives late to the drawing having Clean forgot what day it was (8). The town does not really think much of it, but several people talk about it in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd (9). So Mrs. Hutchinson has already been a little late and marked for slight discussion in the crowd. Shes eager to attend, but is quick to question this drawing when her family is chosen. She protests that Bill, her husband, didnt [have] time enough to take any paper he wanted (46) and that it wasnt fair.
Adding insult to injury, Tess's own husband tells her to "shut up" (48) when she starts to contest his selection as the head of the household, Bill is shamed by Tess's behavior. When the community as a whole repudiates her protests, telling her that "they all took the same chance" (47), Bill must join in the repudiation. One might speculate that he fears being tarred with the same brush, but we think it's something more disturbing than that: the tradition of the lottery appears so natural, soinevitable, to its participants that they cannot imagine protest; to do so seems like a sin against the institution of the lottery rather than the understandable pleas of a woman who doesn't want to die.
Tess's eagerness to see the lottery through is only paralleled by her desperation to get out of it once it turns out to be her turn. She goes so far as to try to substitute her daughter and son-in-law for herself, yelling, "There's Don and Eva [...] Make them take their chance!" Her extreme moral compromise, as she tries to offer up her daughter for the slaughter instead of herself, underlines that this ritual has nothing to do with virtuous martyrdom; Tess is no saint. Her murder is exactly that: a vicious, group killing of a frightened, antiheroic woman.
In her final moments, we saw a different woman. Even though she was innocently killed, she was escaping tradition and trying to substitute anyone to her place so she wouldnt die. Even trying to add Don and Eva to the family, to redraw, so she didnt have to die. Her final moments spoke louder than who she was before she knew she was to be stoned.
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