We can see the themes of scapegoating an individual and the mistakes of the community in Jackson's "The Lottery" and Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind.
The theme of a community needing a scapegoat is evident in both works. Both works show how the community needs a target, someone who can be painted as an outsider or "not one of us." In Jackson's "The Lottery," this process is facilitated through the lottery. The lottery was part of the town's history for generations. It is a practice of identifying one person through random drawing and then stoning them to death. In this story's plot, Tessie Hutchinson's name is drawn. She becomes the community's scapegoat. Tessie's pleas of "It's not fair" and "It's not right" are silenced when the first stone hits her head. Tessie's scapegoating is very similar to Bert Cates's. The town targets the high school science teacher for upsetting traditional teachings. When Cates teaches Darwininan evolution to his students, it challenges their embrace of Biblical instruction. As a result, townspeople feel it is their responsibility to target Bert Cates. The trial is their way of identifying a scapegoat they feel must be punished. Tessie and Bert are seen as outsiders and are targeted as a result.
The process of scapegoating reveals the profound mistake of each community. The townspeople in "The Lottery" do not admit they are wrong, but it is clear that what they are doing is awful. Jackson contrasts the idyllic setting at the start of the story with the townspeople's savagery at its end. While the members of the community do not see a problem with their tradition, Jackson's depiction forces us to condemn their practices and reflect on our society's own. Inherit the Wind shows the town as equally wrong for their scapegoating of Bert Cates through the trial. Drummond's cross-examination of Brady goes very far in making the townspeople realize their mistake. While Cates is not fully exonerated with the verdict, the townspeople do not possess the same scapegoating fervor at the end of the trial that they did in the beginning. Both works forcefully display the the community's mistake.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
What are similarities in themes between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment