"The Lottery" Character Analysis, Mrs. Hutchinson

543 Words3 Pages
In Shirley Jackson’s 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. She’s eager to attend, but is quick to question this drawing when her family is chosen. She protests that Bill, her husband, “didn’t [have] time enough to take any paper he wanted “ (46) and that it “wasn’t 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, so inevitable, to its participants that they cannot imagine protest; to
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