Trapped Women in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and “Other” Stories

This thesis combines a feminist and historical framework to analyze in detail the stories in The Lottery and Other Stories, in order to showcase how Jackson depicts married and unmarried women as repressed and judged by mainstream American society in the immediate post-war era. Specifically, it employs Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the woman being labelled as the inferior “Other” by virtue of the dominant gender ideology of the 1940s, which is described in detail in her work The Second Sex. According to De Beauvoir, the dominant gender ideology of the 1940s confined and repressed women to the home, leaving them with no other choice than to fulfill the role of the housewife (De Beauvoir). This feminist framework is combined with an in-depth exploration by other feminists, such as Betty Friedan, Eleanor Roosevelt and Clara Fraser, as well as scholars that have researched feminist history, such as Gerda Lerner, Estelle Freedman, Stephen Dillon and Zillah Eisenstein. In combining these...Show moreThis thesis combines a feminist and historical framework to analyze in detail the stories in The Lottery and Other Stories, in order to showcase how Jackson depicts married and unmarried women as repressed and judged by mainstream American society in the immediate post-war era. Specifically, it employs Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the woman being labelled as the inferior “Other” by virtue of the dominant gender ideology of the 1940s, which is described in detail in her work The Second Sex. According to De Beauvoir, the dominant gender ideology of the 1940s confined and repressed women to the home, leaving them with no other choice than to fulfill the role of the housewife (De Beauvoir). This feminist framework is combined with an in-depth exploration by other feminists, such as Betty Friedan, Eleanor Roosevelt and Clara Fraser, as well as scholars that have researched feminist history, such as Gerda Lerner, Estelle Freedman, Stephen Dillon and Zillah Eisenstein. In combining these views on women and their position in society during the period in which The Lottery and Other Stories was composed, this thesis provides new insight into Jackson’s response to the treatment of women during her day and will shed a light on how her views paralleled the views of feminists such as Friedan, Roosevelt and Fraser, and historians such as Lerner and Eisenstein. This thesis shows that Shirley Jackson is not merely a Gothic fantasist writer but, above all, a social realist because of the way in which she depicts the women in her stories as victims of a patriarchal society. Moreover, her early short stories show in their representation of women marked parallels to actual real-life victimization of women in the 1940s, as depicted in the writings of feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir.Show less

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Trapped Women in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and “Other” Stories