laughterhouse-Five revolves around Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut, was a POW in Dresden when it was decimated by Allied firebombing during World War Two.[1] Billy has “come unstuck in time.”[2] And to complicate matters further, he is abducted by aliens, two-foot-tall creatures, who are shaped like toilet plungers, from the planet Tralfamadore.[3]

Why was Slaughterhouse-Five banned? Kurt Vonnegut’s searingly sarcastic, darkly funny, science fiction-infused war story is considered one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. Needless to say, it includes a good dose of rough language, the kind soldiers have been known to use. Bearing both of these things in mind, it’s no surprise that Vonnegut’s novel has been challenged at least eighteen times, with “obscene language,” and “anti-American” sentiment or “lack of patriotism,” consistently among the objections.[4] But as always, some challenges were more successful than others.

A petition to remove Slaughterhouse-Five (among other books) from the junior high and high school libraries of Island Trees Union Free Public School District, made it to the US Supreme Court. Fortunately, citing the First Amendment, the court found that these books could not be removed from the school district’s libraries.[5]

On the other hand, there’s Drake, North Dakota, a banning that got Vonnegut’s personal attention. In 1973, school officials voted to withdraw Slaughterhouse-Five from the curriculum. Most students, however, didn’t want to give up their copy of the novel. So, lockers were searched, books confiscated, and all 32 copies were ultimately burned in the school’s furnace.[6]

The event made national headlines. And Vonnegut sent a biting letter to the chairman of the Drake School Board, who apparently couldn’t fathom what all the fuss was about. In his typical no-holds-barred style, Vonnegut stated what to many of us is obvious:

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that.[7]

Vonnegut concluded his letter by summing up the stand against censorship book burning like only he can:

Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them… it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you haven’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and survive.[8]

To Vonnegut’s point, this book is definitely more than just a stockpile of salty language. But, why is Slaughterhouse-Five important? Like all literature, it’s a snapshot of the culture that produced it. As noted in an earlier post, authors and their works present, analyze, and shed light on the social maladies of their day. When readers look beyond Slaughterhouse Five’s rough language, it’s obvious that this book addresses the devastating aftereffects of war. And the novel’s time-traveling, non-linear structure mimics a debilitating psychological condition, one our soldiers struggle with all too often as a result of their war experience.
_____

No parts for
Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

Science-fiction tropes may carry Slaughterhouse-Five’s narrative, but Vonnegut’s novel tells the very real tale of a verifiable historical event. In the book’s opening chapter, however, Vonnegut makes it clear that he wrote about the firebombing of Dresden because of its historical significance, rather than simply because it made for an exciting personal war story.[9]

But, Vonnegut doesn’t write from the romanticized, gung-ho perspective prevalent in post-World War Two culture. As he tells us in the novel’s autobiographical first chapter, after an uncomfortable conversation with his war-buddy’s wife (Mary O’Hare, to whom Slaughterhouse-Five is dedicated), he realized that the book he was about to write would add to the cultural mythology that perpetuates war and glamorizes young men’s participation in them.[10] So, Vonnegut made her a promise, vowing that if he ever finished his book and it was made into a movie, there would be no parts for actors like Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. There would be no roles for “glamorous, war loving, dirty old men,” who “make war look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.”[11]

Consequently, Vonnegut’s novel doesn’t praise the British bombers who carried out the raid, justify American involvement, or support World War Two generally for that matter. Instead, he wrote about hungry and sick prisoners of war. He tells us about a good man who survives the bombing but is executed for picking a teapot out of the rubble.[12] And as Vonnegut points out in the novel, “there are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations.”[13] He wrote it this way because “one of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters,” by which he means being seen as human beings.[14]
_____

Why is Slaughterhouse-Five’s
1969 publication date significant?

As also mentioned in a previous post, the period a book was written in can tell us a lot. And Slaughterhouse-Five’s 1969 publication date, nearly twenty-five years after Vonnegut’s release from a repatriation camp in France, is definitely noteworthy.[15] It’s significant for a couple of reasons. First, because dissent toward the Vietnam war finally freed writers to report on World War Two events that “made war look so ugly.”[16] The time frame is also pertinent because it is during this period that Mental Health professionals began defining the symptoms of PTSD, and advocating for an official diagnosis for this debilitating effect of war.[17] This tidbit of medical history is relevant because Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse-Five’s haunted protagonist, appears to be “a text-book sufferer of PTSD.”[18]

Some significant insight into PTSD is that it’s caused by more than the trauma itself. The “psychosocial atmosphere” of the society soldiers are returning to can, and often does, hinder the process of coping with traumatizing events.[19] And this situation can be observed in Slaughterhouse-Five. When Billy comes home after the war, the environment in America isn’t conducive to working through the trauma he experienced as a soldier.

Shortly after he returns from the war, Billy resumes optometry school. By the middle of his final year, he has himself committed to a veterans’ hospital for non-violent mental patients. And though the doctors agree that Billy was indeed “going crazy” (as Vonnegut describes it), “they didn’t think it had anything to do with the war.”[20] Billy’s doctors were certain his issues could only have stemmed from childhood experiences.

This scene reflects the medical history noted above. PTSD wasn’t even on the medical community’s radar until the the Vietnam war. And it wasn’t recognized as a diagnosable psychological disorder until 1980.[21]

As Vonnegut’s remarks about Hollywood films suggest, prior to the emergence of the social movement that opposed the Vietnam war, American culture considered battle experience to have a positive, maturing effect on young men.[22] Billy’s son, Robert, embodies this notion. He was a sixteen-year-old alcoholic who flunked out of high school. But after a couple tours in Vietnam, “he was all straightened out now.”[23] It’s no coincidence that Robert is a Green Beret in the Marine Corps. A very famous film titled The Green Berets had been released just the year before Slaughterhouse-Five was published.  And it starred the selfsame John Wayne that Mary O’Hare called out as bearing responsibility for glamorizing war.

There’s also the gung-ho, political American mindset that kept information about Dresden quiet for so many years. Vonnegut put this attitude in the mouth of Professor Rumfoord, Billy’s hospital roommate following the airplane crash that killed everyone but Billy. When asked why Dresden would be kept a secret for so many years, Rumfoord answered, “For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts… might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.”[24]

The culture that emerges from these commonly held perspectives prevented the negative effects of wartime experience and resultant PTSD from being taken seriously.[25] But as Rumfoord was finally forced to acknowledge that Billy had indeed been in Dresden during the Allied firebombing, PTSD was finally recognized as a trauma-related condition.
_____

Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time”,
a text-book case of PTSD.

Vonnegut himself describes Slaughterhouse-Five as being “jumbled and jangled.”[26] And his non-linear structure resembles the most common symptom of PTSD, “re-experiencing… when a person involuntarily and vividly relives the traumatic event.” [27] This can occur through nightmares, repetitive images and sensations, or it can take the form of flashbacks.[28]

One form of re-experiencing is reflected in Vonnegut’s repetition of particular phrases. These phrases function as both a psychological and narrative linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war. One example is the oft-repeated image of “blue and ivory feet,” which Billy first saw on corpses while being marched to a POW camp.[29] There’s also the frequently referenced “smell of roses and mustard gas,” whose first chronological encounter occurred in the corpse mines of Dresden.[30]

And then, there’s Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as having “come unstuck in time.”[31] Billy time travels, spontaneously and frequently. And the fact that Billy has no control over what part of his life he’ll find himself in, echoes the flashbacks experienced by many who suffer from PTSD.

Flashbacks occur in cases of PTSD because the process of memory consolidation is short-circuited. Familiar, non-stressful events are automatically assimilated and the information in our brain’s “active memory storage” is rapidly eliminated. But that’s not the case with traumatic events.[32] As amazing as our brains are, they have a limited capacity for processing. And information associated with extraordinary, stressful events can’t be processed rapidly, so it remains in active memory storage and continues to run in the background, if you will. When a traumatic memory is triggered, it inserts itself into active consciousness, like pop-ups on websites if you don’t have an ad-blocker.[33]

Specific triggers, things that remind Billy of the war, prompt his time travel/flashbacks. For example, the siren announcing high noon on the firehouse across the street “scared the hell out of him,” and catapults him back in time: “Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again.”[34] Another triggering instance occurs when Billy was in the mental ward, and his room-mate is reading a book:

Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied to the bed in the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor old Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.[35]

Like the repeated phrases mentioned above, Billy’s time travel/flashbacks also function as a linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war.

A great big secret somewhere inside.

The barbershop quartet at Billy’s anniversary party also triggers a war-related memory. But this time, his response is very different. Rather than having a flashback/time traveling:

His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack… [36]

While coming unstuck in time is the result of a memory that has been partially processed, the barbershop quartet triggers Billy’s response to a memory that had been suppressed. So, even Billy himself didn’t understand why the song evoked such anguish. He finally realizes that the barbershop quartet reminded him of the expressions on the faces of four gobsmacked German guards as they take in the sight of the freshly devastated Dresden.[37] When everyone, guards and prisoners alike, emerged from the meat locker they were sheltering in:

… the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.[38]

The bombing of Dresden is the epicenter of Billy’s trauma. As such, it was not just too frightening to relive, but too painful to even remember. So he suppressed the memory altogether, that is until it was triggered by the barbershop quartet.[39]
_____

What’s with the Tralfamadorians?

Billy’s roommate in the mental hospital, Eliot Rosewater, introduced Billy to the science fiction books of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had been an infantry captain in the war, and he and Billy were both feeling the “sense of dislocation and absurdity” frequently experienced by survivors of atrocity, a sensibility that destroys their previous assumption of a rational universe.[40]  So, as Vonnegut specifically tells us, Billy and Rosewater use science fiction to “re-invent themselves and their universe.”[41]

One of the books Billy read while he was in the mental hospital was titled Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension. It helped Billy understand why his doctors couldn’t fix what was wrong with him. According to Trout’s book, “mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension.”[42] So, Billy’s three-dimensional Earthling doctors weren’t actually incompetent. They couldn’t identify the cause of his problems, because they were unable to see them. Rather like the way the psychosocial atmosphere in America hindered Mental Health professionals from identifying PTSD prior to the Vietnam era.

The Tralfamadorian concept of time offers Billy an explanation for his flashbacks. According to the Tralfamadorians, the notion that moments occur one after another, and are gone forever once they have past, is merely an illusion we have here on Earth. Tralfamadorians can:

…look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.[43]

This is an apt description what happens in a flashback. All moments are active. As mentioned earlier, the brain hasn’t finished processing traumatic memories and removed them from active memory storage. And when a particular moment is triggered, indicating interest in that moment, the subject (re-)experiences it.

As a result of their understanding of time, when Tralfamadorians see a corpse they merely think the dead person is in a bad state at that precise moment. That same person is in fine shape in plenty of other moments. A passage within Slaughterhouse-Five that overlaps the moment when Billy’s entire company was killed with a moment of camaraderie during boot camp, indicates the psychological benefits of seeing time in this way.

Billy’s fellow soldiers were merely “theoretically dead.”[44]  And these “theoretical corpses” were still able to laugh and eat “a hearty noontime meal.”[45] Recalling the incident some years later, “Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.”[46] In short, understanding time as the Tralfamadorians do provides Billy with the tools to get a handle on his condition. These tools also allow him to cope with the vast amount of death he witnessed in the war, which caused his condition in the first place.
_____

Why are aliens
intertwined with Billy’s PTSD?

Once again, Vonnegut’s use of aliens reflects what was going in American culture when he was writing his novel. At the time Slaughterhouse-Five was published, the Roswell incident had been in American culture for about twenty years. And reports of alien encounters were beginning to crop up. These alien abduction stories indicate that, during this period, science fiction has gone beyond merely being a genre of fiction to become a way of looking at the world.[47]

It’s interesting to note that the first widely publicized account came from someone who, like Billy Pilgrim, was a World War Two veteran. The fact that this abductee said the alien in charge reminded him of “an evil-faced German Nazi” officer is intriguing indeed.[48] This shared characteristic with Billy Pilgrim is especially compelling, given that he also noted a similarity between the “precision of movement” the alien crew exhibited when they moved as a group, and German soldiers.[49]

Studies of alien abduction accounts indicate that, along with other phobias and aversions, subjects commonly experience a confused temporality and gaps in time. These symptoms are frequently related to trauma, which as we have seen, often disrupts memory assimilation. In order for the subject to protect themselves from remembering the event that created their psychic wound, these gaps in time demand to be filled.[50] After the Roswell incident “proved” the existence of extraterrestrials, an alien abduction story is the perfect way to account for this missing time.
_____

In Conclusion.

Slaughterhouse-Five is clearly more than a jumbled bag of sarcastic anti-American rhetoric, sprinkled with a good dose of rough language. Like all literature, Vonnegut’s novel reflects what was going on in the culture that produced it. Even if, like PTSD prior to the Vietnam era, it doesn’t have a name yet. This book does more than just talk about the devastating after-effects of war, however. It gives engaged readers a very small taste of what it’s like to try and make sense of the world when suffering from this debilitating psychological condition.

The moral of Slaughterhouse-Five is simple, War is Hell. By showing us how damaging trauma is, especially on the scale endured as a result of World War Two, Vonnegut does indeed make the case for why people need to be kinder and more responsible than they often are.

That’s my take on Slaughterhouse Five – what’s yours?
Check out this discussion guide to get you started.

    #book burning      #post-war social commentary     #banned books    #PTSD    #published 1960s

Endnotes:

[1] Powers, Kevin. “Forward.” Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), xi.
[2] Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), 25.
[3] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 28.
[4] Morais, Betsy. “The Neverending Campaign to Ban “Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Atlantic, August 12, 2011; Henriksen, Megan. “Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Banned Books Project @Carnegie Mellon University. September 12, 2019.
[5] Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 et al., Petitioners, v. Steven A. PICO, by his next friend Frances Pico et al. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/457/853.
[6] Johnson, Hannah. “40 years later, the resentment still smolders.” The Bismarck Tribune. Nov. 10, 2013; Stevens, William K. “Dakota Town Dumfounded at Criticism of Book Burning by Order of the school Board.” The New York Times, Nov. 16, 1973.
[7] Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2011), 4-5.
[8] Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 6.
[9] Laufert, Wayne. “From the Slaughter.” The Humanist.com (Feb. 19, 2019).
[10] Kunze, Peter C. “For the Boys: Masculinity, Gray Comedy, and the Vietnam War in ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Studies in American Humor. New Series 3, No. 26, Special Issue: Kurt Vonnegut and Humor (2012), 45.
[11] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 17, 16.
[12] Laufert, “From the Slaughter.”
[13] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[14] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[15] Solly, Mellan. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Unpublished World War II Scrapbook Reveals Origins of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Smithsonianmag.com (Dec. 14, 2018).
[16] “‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50.” 2003 Interview with Renee Montagne. NPR radio. (June 6, 2019).
[17] Scott, Wilbur J. “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease.” Social Problems, Vol 37, No. 3 (Aug., 1990).
[18] Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[19]  Kleber, Rolf J., Charles R. Figley, and Bertold P. R. Gersons. Beyond Trauma: Cultural and Societal Dynamics. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. (New York: Plenum, 1995), 2.
[20] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 103.
[21] Friedman, Matthew J. A Brief History of the PTSD Diagnosis. PTSD: National Center or PTSD.
[22] Bracken, Patrick J. “Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Social science & Medicine. Vol 53 (2001), 734.
[23] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 194.
[24] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 195.
[25] Bracken, Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder, 735.
[26] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 21.
[27] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms/
[28] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
[29] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 68.
[30] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 219; Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[31] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 25.
[32] Horowitz, Mardi J. Stress Response Syndromes: PTSD, Grief, Adjustment, and Dissociative Disorders. (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 2011), 84.
[33] Horowitz, 84-85.
[34] Kavanaugh, 14; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 60.
[35] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 108.
[36] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 177.
[37] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[38] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 182.
[39] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[40] Lifton, Robert J. “Beyond Atrocity.” Saturday Review. (March 27, 1971), 23.
[41] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 104.
[42] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 107.
[43] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 29.
[44] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[45] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[46] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 34.
[47] Luckhurst, Roger. “The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 21, No. 1 (March, 1998), 29.
[48] Friedman, Stanton T. and Kathleen Marden. Captured!: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007), 136.
[49] Friedman, 108.
[50] Luckhurst, 37.

Images:

Cover – 1st edition. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five.  (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969). Jacket design by Paul Bacon” is found on the left jacket flap. (For jurisdictions that define copyright term on the date of the author’s death: according to this article, Bacon died in 2015.) – AbeBooks (direct link to jpg)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80843456

No Parts for John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. “The Longest Day.” trailer screenshot (20th Century Fox), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Billy Pilgrim, a Text-book Case of PTSD. Photo by Ahmad Ossayli on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/laJW5pp-6Yw?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

A Great Big Secret Somewhere Inside. Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash  https://unsplash.com/photos/x21KgBfOd_4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Why are Aliens Intertwined with Billy’s PTSD? Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/sMPRCsoUM4A?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

hat’s up with the brouhaha that perpetually revolves around this book? Why was The Catcher in the Rye banned? In short, Salinger’s work challenged the status quo. And it did so in an era defined by conformity. So, the outcome is pretty predictable. As a New York Times columnist once put it, The Catcher in the Rye has been “yanked out of American schools more than almost any other title.”[1] And the challenges come fast and furious.

The earliest attempt to remove The Catcher in the Rye from high school reading materials occurred in 1954, and took place in Marin County, California. Shortly after that, a similar effort was made to restrict students’ reading of the book in Los Angeles County. The following year, it was censored in Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, and Port Huron as well. In 1956, a group known as The National Organization for Decent Literature labeled The Catcher in the Rye  objectionable.[2] At this point, Catcher had also been banned in Fairmont, McMechen, St. Louis, and Wheeling, West Virginia. Efforts to ban Salinger’s work continued to expand.[3]
.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Between 1961 and 1965, there were eighteen separate attempts to ban The Catcher in the Rye from high school campuses, creating enough controversy to draw the attention of national newspapers.[4] But challenges haven’t been limited to the decades immediately following the novel’s publication – the hits just keep on coming! According to the office of Intellectual Freedom, the novel is “a perennial No. 1 on the censorship hit list,” and has remained on the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book report well into the 21^st century.[5]
_________

What’s the rub, anyway?

Why is The Catcher in the Rye so controversial? Attacks on Catcher revolve around a number of concerns. Grievances usually have to do with language challengers consider offensive – one parent cited 785 “profanities.”[6] Objections frequently involve blasphemy. Or a general “family values” kind of complaint, like the undermining of parental authority. To top things off, Holden Caulfield’s criticism of “home life, [the] teaching profession, religion, and so forth” was summed up as an assault on patriotism, with Catcher labeled downright un-American.[7] Holden Caulfield, challengers charge, is quite simply not a good role model for teen-age readers.[8]

But, is Salinger’s protagonist intended to be a role model? If these concerned citizens realized that literature is a powerful platform for examining societal ills, they would have understood that depicting such behavior doesn’t necessarily mean the author is endorsing it. In fact, quite the opposite. When read merely for plot, The Catcher in the Rye appears to be nothing more than the story of a teenage boy having trouble transitioning to adulthood. However, the inappropriate behavior Holden Caulfield engages in, and the way he expresses himself have a rhetorical purpose. And when read accordingly, they reflect the shifting societal landscape Salinger sees in postwar America. Holden is grappling with the same kinds of questions the challengers’ own children are facing. Holden Caulfield is not, in fact, intended to be a role model. Because Salinger’s work is about much more than the antics of a rebellious teenager.

Given the kinds of complaints behind the banning of Salinger’s novel, it is no surprise that one of its challenges was led by a woman who had not read, and declared she would never read, The Catcher in the Rye.[9]  What is surprising is that someone who hasn’t even read a particular book has the capacity to restrict others’ access to it.

What these censors fail to realize is that there’s more to The Catcher in the Rye than “Holden Caulfield is a bad boy with a potty mouth.” Having said that, why is Catcher important? And what’s Holden is so cranked up about in the first place? Come to find out, Holden Caulfield is a twentieth-century Jeremiah._________

Holden Caulfield:
Twentieth-century Jeremiah.

During the post-World War II period when popular culture was trumpeting American ideals, Salinger was writing about the realities of the social experience in America, those obscured by a society consumed with image and material goals. Though The Catcher in the Rye has resonated with teenage readers as an expression of adolescent alienation for generations, it isn’t just about raging against the establishment. As Salinger’s biographers note, he was “not just another nihilist; and Holden [is] not just another lost boy.”[10] When read for more than plot, both the book and the boy exhibit a spiritual nature. Holden isn’t just running away from adulthood. He seeks to transcend a materially obsessed culture.

Salinger didn’t set out to write an anti-American diatribe, as The Catcher in the Rye has been labeled by those attempting to ban it. He was actually writing within the most American of literary forms, the jeremiad, to convey a message of reform. The jeremiad is a rhetorical method that was named for the prophet Jeremiah and used by the Puritans, one designed to keep American society in line with its ideals by calling attention to its flaws.[11]

An essential fact about The Catcher in the Rye, is that Holden does not reject historically American values. What he does is criticize the flawed way they’re enacted in modern society, and berate the replacement of morality with conformity.[12]  As his sister Phoebe points out to him, Holden has the Robert Burns line of poetry wrong, an incorrect recollection that gives us the novel’s title: it’s “if a body meet a body,” rather than “if a body catch a body.” What Holden’s misremembering tells us is that he’s not “looking for love in all the wrong places,” but as with all “Jeremiahs” (and maybe a few bullfrogs), he wants to save society from a corrupt and deteriorating culture.[13]
_______

It’s about more than teen-age angst.

On its face, The Catcher in the Rye is about an immature teenage boy unable to come to terms with his impending adulthood. And more often than not, it is this perspective that’s taught in schools. Sure, high school students can relate to that narrative. But “life is hard, and Holden needs to get himself together,” is a cursory reading of the novel at best.

The book has also been described as “a story about a boy whose little brother has died,” with Holden’s negative perspective on the world seen as a manifestation of his grief.[14] This interpretation does indeed delve beneath the surface narrative. And it is enlightening. But there’s still more to Catcher than the psychology behind Holden’s actions.

Others have read Salinger’s work through the lens of his World War II-induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But, what’s the point of writing that book? For therapeutic purposes, perhaps? Holden’s exchange with Mr. Antolini suggests such a possibility, that he may be able to help himself by helping others with his novel. It is true that we are all “broken” in one way or another, and Catcher is most certainly relatable on that level. But, the self-imposed exile Salinger is so famous for suggests a purpose other than reaching out to other “irreparably damaged” people with a healing message.[15]

I would argue that The Catcher in the Rye is a re-fashioned jeremiad. Not only because this interpretation considers the author and his historical context, but because, as Lionel Trilling points out, “literary situations [are] cultural situations.”[16] Understanding Salinger’s work as a jeremiad takes “the animus of the author” into account.[17] That is, what he wants to see happen as a result of people reading his book.
_________

What the heck is a Jeremiad?

Considered America’s first distinct literary genre, the jeremiad is a political sermon that, as mentioned above, takes its tone from the biblical prophet Jeremiah. It’s a mode of public exhortation used by the New England Puritans through the close of the eighteenth century for the purpose of social revitalization. In other words, the American jeremiad is a call for America to self-correct.[18]

These days, in industrialized societies like ours, it’s genres such as film, popular music, and literature that serve to expose injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities in social structures. These modes influence culture by getting us to think about the shortcomings in our society. This leads to new insights, which in turn take root and reshape cultural expectations.[19]
_________

There’s a long history of literature as jeremiad.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye belongs to a lineage of American writers who have inherited and re-fashioned the jeremiad genre, authors who produced literature thick with spiritual protest.[20] Harriett Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, lambastes the country’s great sin of slavery, (and resulted in active resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act).[21] Henry David Thoreau’s essay Life Without Principle decries America’s narrow focus on making money, as well as the superficial nature of media, that “blunt[s]” a person’s sense of what is right.[22] Then there’s John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which laments the widespread foreclosures and subsequent homelessness caused by the “double whammy” of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. This work takes aim at “American greed, waste, and spongy morality.[23] And the lineage continues right up through Salinger and beyond.

Given Holden Caulfield’s constant judgement of the world as he sees it, The Catcher in the Rye is nothing if not the “catalogue of iniquities” inherent to the jeremiad form.[24] Interestingly, the fact that Catcher’s critique of mainstream American goals has led to it being labeled “un-American” parallels the history of the American jeremiad itself.[25]

The Puritans failed to realize how their self-denunciations would sound to non-New England ears. And they were nothing short of shocked when others took their jeremiads at face value, which prompted leaders from competing charters to proclaim New England “a sink of iniquity.”[26] Bearing this in mind, it became necessary to explain that the jeremiad was a rhetorical exercise, intended as motivation to live up to American ideals.

A similar reproach is echoed in Sinclair Lewis’ declaration, “I love America… I love it, but I don’t like it,” a sentiment that also runs through the following passage from The Catcher in the Rye[27]:

But you’re wrong about that hating business. I mean about hating football players and all. You really are. I don’t hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hated them once in a while – I admit it – but it doesn’t last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn’t see them, if they didn’t come in the room, or if I didn’t see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.[28]

Though Holden does indeed lambaste his classmates, as this passage shows he doesn’t carry any ongoing animosity toward them, or football players generally. Rather, his indictments call out particular behaviors commonplace in the larger society.
_________

What makes Holden Caulfield a “Jeremiah”?

Holden expresses a fear that he’s disappearing as he crosses from one side of the road or street to the other, an image that bookends the narrative. This symbolizes his sense of diminishing authenticity within American society. As Perry Miller argues in his work on the American jeremiad, since the days of Jonathan Edwards (a fiery eighteenth-century minister referred to as the last Puritan), western civilization has put reflections about the larger meaning of existence aside.[29] We have distracted ourselves with materialism and concerns for image, pursuits that do nothing to address the ills of society. And it is this demise of American ideals that Allie Caulfield’s death signifies, an interpretation underscored by Holden’s prophetic appeal, “Allie, don’t let me disappear,” when crossing the street toward the end of the novel.[30]

And, Holden Caulfield’s iconic red hunting hat is the most important symbol in The Catcher in the Rye. It alludes to the “hunters” mentioned in the book of Jeremiah, invading nations invoked as divine retribution for Israel’s failure to heed the prophet’s warnings.[31] The hat’s color is significant because red is the traditional color of forewarning, or signaling alarm. Fire trucks and ambulance lights both flash red, as do those at railroad crossings. In keeping with what the hat symbolizes, Holden’s reference to it as a “people hunting hat” indicates that he is “taking aim” as it were, to expose their hypocrisy and “phoniness.” To read it as a call for actual violence is a failure to engage the novel’s symbolic language. Needless to say, no one escapes Holden’s critical eye.
_________

What are Holden’s Puritanical ideals?

Though the fervor of Holden’s accusations is typically attributed to him being a “disaffected teen,” his targets align with themes common in the colonial pulpit, specifically, being tempted by profits and pleasures, false dealing with God, and the corruption of children.[32]

Regarding profits, Holden makes it very clear that he considers his older brother to have sold-out. D. B. used to write short stories, including Holden’s favorite about a boy so proud of buying a goldfish with his own money, that he wouldn’t let anyone else see it. But now, D. B.’s a Hollywood screenwriter who buys extravagant cars for all to see. These days, it’s more about greed and image than writing good stories.[33]

The Christmas pageant at Radio City also takes a hit. The holiday has been reduced to nothing more than a means of chasing profit. Angels emerge from gift-wrapped boxes, and “guys carrying crucifies and stuff all over the place,” all while singing Oh, Come All Ye Faithful. In typical irreverent fashion, Holden calls out the crass commercialization of a subject that should be approached with reverence and respect, proclaiming “Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it—all those fancy costumes and all.”[34]

Holden specifically addresses false dealing with God in a story revolving around Ossenburger, a Pencey donor speaking at a school event. Ossenburger is an alumnus who “made a pot of dough in the undertaking business” with a nation-wide franchise of cut-rate funeral parlors, sufficient wealth to bankroll the dormitories commemorated with his name. During school chapel, Ossenburger urges students to talk to Jesus all the time, which he himself does (or so he says), even while driving his Cadillac. Holden’s remark about Ossenburger “shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs,” targets hypocritical relationships with God, those based on show rather than piety and service.[35]

And where pleasures are concerned, unlike his “unscrupulous” classmate Stadlater who doesn’t even remember his dates’ names correctly, Holden aspires to spend time with girls he can relate to on an emotional or intellectual level. [36] Preferring a well-rounded relationship, Holden states, “If you really don’t like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all.”[37]

The corruption of children is a particular hotspot for Holden Caulfield. Discovering obscene graffiti on the wall of his sister’s grade school drives him “damn near crazy.” He is irate thinking about how “some dirty kid” would tell Phoebe and her classmates what the offensive phrase means. And how, given their young age, the act portrayed would be confusing and nothing less than disturbing.[38]

The very name of Salinger’s book refers to Holden’s need to protect “little kids.” But how so, what does the title of The Catcher in the Rye mean? In the context of the titular metaphor, he envisions himself patrolling a field of rye, and catching the children who are playing there should they start to go over the “crazy cliff,” typically understood as adulthood.[39] From Holden’s prophetic view, adulthood would require the corruption of these children to be in line with a degraded society, consumed with image and material goals rather than traditional American ideals.
_________

The Jeremiad: Not just an
“Undying Monotonous Wail.”[40]

Despite its catalogue of iniquities, the American jeremiad’s distinctiveness doesn’t lie in the intensity of its complaint, but precisely the opposite. At the heart of this genre is an unwavering optimism in the American ideal. Which, as scholar Sacvan Bercovitch maintains, grows more emphatic “from one generation to the next.”[41]

Which is why Phoebe Caulfield enters the picture when she does. She embodies the “next” generation Bercovitch is referring to. The fact that Phoebe is the only character throughout the novel who actually listens to what Holden has to say is significant, in that she’s the one who “hears” his prophetic message.[42] And Holden allows her to wear his hunting hat, which establishes Phoebe as successor to Holden’s mission. Finally, Holden literally sets Phoebe in motion with a ticket for the carousel, where she optimistically sets her sights on the golden ring, an obvious symbol for the American ideal. The proverbial torch has been passed, with Phoebe carrying Holden’s mission forward.
_________

In Conclusion.

Reading The Catcher in the Rye as a re-fashioned jeremiad, we understand that Salinger’s intent was not to malign America. Very far from it. Like the Puritan jeremiads whose message was also misunderstood, Catcher urges America to remember the ideals on which it was founded, principles we appear to have forgotten, and to self-correct. What Salinger hoped to accomplish is that the readers of his novel would make that happen. But like the question of whether or not Holden will apply himself in school next year, it’s up to us to engage the endeavor.

That’s my take on J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye – what’s yours?
Check out this Discussion Guide to get you started.

#post-war social commentary         #banned        #Puritan          #published 1950s

Endnotes:

[1] Quindlen, Anna. “Public & Private; Dirty Pictures.” The New York Times. April 22, 1990.­­
[2] Whitfield, Stephen J. “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of the Catcher in the Rye.” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), 575.
[3] Steinle, Pamela Hunt. In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002), 73, 52.
[4] Steinle, 61.
[5] Mydans, Seth. “In a Small Town, a Battle Over a Book.” The New York Times, (Sept. 3, 1989).
[6] Whitfield, 575.
[7] Laser, Marvin and Fruman, Norman. “Not Suitable for Temple City.” in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye, and other Fiction. Edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman. (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963), 127.
[8] Mydans.
[9] Mydans.
[10] Shields, David and Salerno, Shane. Salinger. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 265.
[11] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xli; Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10.
[12] Steinle, Pamela. “If a Body Catch a Body: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Debate as Expression of Nuclear Culture.” Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 138, 2001.
[13] Mallette, Wanda; Morrison, Bob; Ryan, Patti. “Lookin’ for Love.” Urban Cowboy Soundtrack. (Hollywood: Full Moon, 1980); Shields and Salerno, 265.
[14] Menard, Louis. “Holden at Fifty: The Catcher in the Rye and what it spawned.” The New Yorker. (September 24, 2001).
[15] Shields and Salerno, 243.
[16] Trilling, Lionel. “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” First published as “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature.” Partisan Review, January-February 1961.
[17] Trilling.
[18] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xli; Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10.
[19] Turner, Victor.  From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 40-45; Turner, Victor. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice Institute Pamphlet – Rice University Studies, 60, no. 3 (1974), 71.
[20] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the symbolic Construction of America. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18.
[21] Senior, Nassau William. American Slavery: A Reprint of an Article on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1856), 2.
[22] Thoreau, Henry David. Life Without Principle. (London: The Simple Life Press, 1905), 29.
[23] Shillinglaw, Susan. “John Steinbeck, American Writer.” The Steinbeck Institute.
[24] Tolchin, Karen R. Part Blood, Part Ketchup: Coming of Age in American Literature and Film. (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 38; Bercovitch (2012), 6-7.
[25] Laser, Marvin and Fruman, Norman. “Not Suitable for Temple City.” in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Cather in the Rye, and other Fiction. Edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman. (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963), 127.
[26] Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. (London: The Belknap Press, 1981), 173-174.
[27] Miller, Perry. “The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis.” The Responsibility of Mind in a civilization of machines. Edited by John Crowell and Stanford J. Searl, Jr. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 121.
[28] Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. (New York: Little Brown and Co., 1991), 187.
[29] Rowe, Joyce. “Holden Caulfield and American Protest.” In New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye. Edited by Jack Salzman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88; Van Engen, Abram C. City on a Hill. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 248; Brand, David C. Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-love, and the Dawn of the Beatific. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991).
[30] Salinger, 198.
[31] Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/jeremiah/16-16.htm; The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Edited by Michael D. Coogen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Jeremiah 3:12-23, Jeremiah 27, Jeremiah 6:13.
[32] Tolchin, 41; Bercovitch (2012), 4.
[33] Salinger, 16.
[34] Salinger, 137.
[35] Salinger, 16.
[36] Salinger, 31.
[37] Salinger, 62.
[38] Salinger, 201.
[39] Salinger, 173.
[40] Bercovitch (2012), 5.
[41] Bercovitch (2012), 6.
[42] Moore, Robert P. “The World of Holden.” The English Journal. Vol. 54, No. 3 (March 1965), 160.

Images:
.
1 The Catcher in the Rye cover from the 1985 Bantam edition. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catcher-in-the-rye-red-cover.jpg   Cropped by User.

2 Rembrandt van Rijn. Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. 1630. Public Domain via Rijkjsmuseum.nl/nl  http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5242

3 Cotton Mather. By Peter Pelham, artist – http://www.columbia.edu/itc/law/witt/images/lect3/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80525

4 Holden Caulfield’s red hunting hat. Clipartmax.com  https://www.clipartmax.com/png/middle/121-1213961_the-red-hunging-hat-2-discussion-posts-kate-said-red-hunting-hat.png  (The original image has been flopped.)

5 First-edition cover of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Public Domain. Source, Nate D. Sanders auctions (direct link to jpg) via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Catcher_in_the_Rye_
(1951,_first_edition_cover).jpg
Original image retouched by uploader, and cropped by current user.

he idea for The Lottery popped into Shirley Jackson’s head on the way home from the market, as she pushed her daughter up the hill in the stroller that also held the day’s groceries. The narrative was fairly clear in her mind, and once she got home putting it on paper went “quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause.”[1]

Jackson’s story seems to have been inspired by a typical, “all-American,” domestic situation. A mother and her young child making preparations for the family’s evening meal – what could be more benevolent than that? So, what made such a story so controversial? Why was The Lottery banned?

The story Jackson wrote that afternoon ends with a famously shocking plot twist, one that provoked controversy the instant it appeared in The New Yorker. The Lottery has been described as a story that “demands a reaction from its reader,” and boy, did readers react![2] Hundreds cancelled their subscriptions.[3] Many of them took Jackson’s story for a factual report. And vehement letters addressed directly to Jackson filled the mailroom, describing her story as “perverted,” “horrible and gruesome,” not to mention “in incredibly bad taste.”[4]

Reasons why The Lottery is routinely banned by public schools fall along similar lines. Jackson’s work was challenged at the Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon for its depiction of “morbid and grotesque ideas.”[5] It was challenged in Webster City, Iowa for being “like Friday the 13^th.” The school administrator specifically took offense to the story’s insinuation “that a child is stoning a parent.”[6]

Those who set out to ban The Lottery from school curriculums saw it as an attack on the family by way of undermined traditions. Challengers interviewed for an article in the journal Social Education expressed concern that reading Jackson’s story causes students “to question their values, traditions, and religious beliefs.”[7] And that instilling these thoughts in young readers’ minds is a subtle means of destroying the family unit.

These challengers may not be taking The Lottery as factual reporting, the way many who cancelled their New Yorker subscriptions did. But like those disgruntled subscribers, their objections are the result of a shallow, deficient interpretation of Jackson’s iconic story, of not thinking past the narrative much less their noses.

Though challengers’ observation about The Lottery questioning tradition isn’t inaccurate, it is terribly misguided. The point Jackson makes is more nuanced, and significantly more profound than a call to spit in the eye of tradition out of sheer defiance. The real question here is not, “how could she?!” but “why does Jackson advocate questioning tradition?” And no… it isn’t a devious plan to destroy the American family.
_________

Shirley Jackson’s Raw Materials.

 Who knows what was going through Shirley Jackson’s head as she walked home from the market, just before she put her daughter Joanne in the playpen, the frozen vegetables in the freezer, and The Lottery down on paper. What was so compelling that the story flowed “quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause?”[8]

It might have been the feeling of being a “frozen out” faculty wife by the townspeople where she lived, or the painful awareness of anti-Semitism Jackson had acquired from personal experience.[9] Perhaps it was the anthropology book her husband recently brought home, or the witchcraft she’d been interested in since college. Maybe the motivating factor was world events, the disturbing revelations about  the Holocaust that emerged from the Nuremberg trials just a couple years earlier.[10] These were the raw materials that went into the making of The Lottery, to be sure. And they most certainly inform the shape the work takes. But what must have really been on Jackson’s mind as this story poured forth, was the notion that ordinary people are capable of horrific acts. She as much as says so in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.[11]

And shock them she did. Significantly, Jackson’s story came out while American citizens were still trying to process the distressing reports about the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, Romani people, and other victims. Many Americans were confidently insisting that nothing like that could ever happen here. Then along comes The Lottery, with a disturbing ending that blows a hole in American complacency – straight into the mailboxes of The New Yorker subscribers, no less.[12]

The juxtaposition of ritual murder with modern small-town America is pretty jarring. Especially when the ritual murder is carried out by stoning. As noted, this narrative certainly packs an emotional wallop. And when read for more than plot, when attention is paid to The Lottery’s structure and the symbolism Jackson employs, we see a summary of humankind’s savage past, as well as what her husband referred to as an “anatomy of our times.”[13] And what becomes clear is that humanity is not at the mercy of a “murky, savage id.”[14] No, we are the victim of an unexamined culture and unchanging traditions which, like the lottery in Jackson’s story, actually engenders a cruelty not rooted in our inherent makeup. [15] That is Jackson’s message. It’s also the very real horror within The Lottery.
_________

What Does the Three-Legged Stool Symbolize?

The obvious similarity between the village’s lottery and scapegoat traditions has been pointed out on many occasions. And this parallel gives us insight into the symbolic nature of the three-legged stool that’s placed in the center of the village square. Significantly, it is on this stool that the “the black wooden box,” the mechanism for conducting the lottery, rests.[16] The three-legged stool embodies examples of scapegoating, the raw materials mentioned above that inform The Lottery and its symbolism. One leg stands for the ancient scapegoat ritual itself, which Jackson had become familiar with through the anthropology book her husband brought home. Another leg signifies the Salem Witch Trials, made all the more relevant given her interest in witchcraft and magic. And the third leg represents the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, still fresh in the minds of the entire world.
_________

What are the Origins of Scapegoating?

At its root, the scapegoat tradition is about purging evil, clearing out the ills that have been plaguing the community that is performing the rite. And the scapegoat is literally the vehicle for carrying this evil away. Scapegoating rituals can be found in many cultures, but the term comes from a rite in the biblical book of Leviticus. As in The Lottery, the sacrifice is chosen by lots, in this case a goat. The animal is symbolically marked with the inequities of the people and sent off into the wilderness. Hence, “(e)scape” goat. The goat doesn’t get too far, though, because it’s someone’s job to follow him and drive him off a cliff – backwards. The poor guy never sees it coming. The goat is clearly destroyed, and with it, the evil he was carrying.[17]

But not all scapegoats are goats. In some cultures, they’re human. When it comes to human sacrifice, the first civilization that comes to mind is probably the Aztecs, but they’re certainly not the only ones. Accounts exist from around the world and across the ages, from Ancient Greece to as late as the nineteenth century in the Pacific Islands.[18]  Whatever shape the scapegoat takes, the “general clearance of evil” described above (the purpose most often associated with the scapegoat tradition), occurred periodically. For agrarian cultures, that was typically at a time that coincided with planting or harvest.[19] Though June 27^th doesn’t strictly align with either of those agricultural events, Mr. Warner’s maxim “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” is clearly a nod in that direction.[20]

Though the practice of sacrificing human scapegoats is no longer ritualized, that doesn’t mean it no longer happens. The witchcraft hysteria that continues to inform New England culture, and the Salem Witch Trials specifically, are nothing if not scapegoating. Women labeled as witches (the operative word being labeled), were executed in order to purge their village of Satanic influence. And the Nazi’s effort to purify Germany by “exterminating” Jews, the Romani people and other groups, is scapegoating by industrial means. These are certainly not the only examples of human scapegoating that have taken place after the Age of Enlightenment, but they are the ones that inform The Lottery.
_________

Scapegoating in the Salem Witch Trials.

Jackson never explicitly tells the reader where the lottery takes place. And there’s a reason for that. If she did, her story would no longer be about “anytown America.” But the clues she gives us about the village are important to our understanding of The Lottery beyond simple ambiance. It’s a small farming community of about 300 people. And most of the population has a family name with Anglo-Saxon origins. The last detail Jackson gives us is that the land yields an abundance of stones, a fact critical to the story beyond the obvious reason. These clues suggest that New England is the locale of the story. When taken in total, this information points to the region’s history of witch trials and persecutions, especially when the village’s patriarchal power structure gets thrown into the mix. And the fact that critical scenes in in a young adult book Jackson wrote about witchcraft hysteria (The Witchcraft of Salem Village) parallel scenarios in The Lottery, substantiates an intended allusion to witch trials.[21]

An important parallel between Massachusetts during the witchcraft hysteria and the village where Jackson lived is the power dynamic between genders. In both cases, the targeted women respond to the pressure of male authority by betraying other women. It’s a classic “divide and conquer” scenario. The way this plays out in The Lottery is a testament to how successfully the male-dominated order has been imposed on the village’s women.[22] Tessie’s right when she claims that the lottery wasn’t fair. But not because they didn’t give her husband “enough time to choose.”[23] It wasn’t fair, intentionally or not, because the system was designed from a patriarchal perspective.

So, how does the lottery work? The village’s lottery seems random to all but the most meticulous of readers because, by and large, we still accept being classified by surname (in other words, our father’s name) as the standard. Drawing lots according to the household/ father’s name skews the odds toward “women of a certain age,” especially those with few, or female children. In terms of avoiding the black dot, younger is better because a woman’s children are still at home. Having more children dilutes the possibility of drawing the black dot. And having a lot of boys is better still because they won’t marry out of the family and increase their mother’s risk as she ages. Tessie’s betrayal of her married daughter, by insisting that she take her chances with the Hutchinsons, is born of this inequity.[24]

Our trip through the lottery process in Jackson’s village reveals a parallel between the demographic most at risk in The Lottery, and the women most frequently persecuted as witches. The witch trials of Puritan Massachusetts were founded on a patriarchal interpretation of the myth of Eve and her role in The Fall. A second layer of patriarchal thought deems her, and by extension all women, more susceptible to the demonic than men – at least according to a couple of Dominican inquisitors from 1486. And women labeled as witches (the operative word being labeled), were executed in an effort to purify their village of Satanic influence.

The group most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft was women between forty and sixty. That’s the same segment of society most likely to draw the black dot in The Lottery. In Puritan Massachusetts, accusations of witchcraft served to crush a particular class of women, insufficiently docile women who failed to fit into their assigned role of submissive helpmeet, those who spoke their minds or attempted to run their own affairs.[25]

So, why was Tessie Hutchinson stoned to death The Lottery? Tessie is precisely this type of woman. She shows up late and must weave her way through the crowd to reach her husband, who had been waiting quite some time for her to arrive. Tessie barks at her husband to “get up there,” when it’s his turn to select a slip of paper from the wooden box.[26]  And she certainly isn’t docile when she shouts and yells, challenging the fairness of the lottery and by extension male authority.

Unfortunately for Tessie, much like the women of Puritan Massachusetts,[27] the other women in the village seem to have internalized the ominous lesson they were intended to learn, which is to keep their places in the established order.[28] For, it’s only women Jackson calls out by name as charging toward Tessie, stones in hand as the story ends.
_________

More Scapegoating in the Holocaust.

News from the Nuremberg trials, and revelations about the Holocaust were fresh in everyone’s mind. The horrific stories were more personal for Jackson than many Americans because, as the wife of a Jewish husband, she had first-hand experience with anti-Semitism. And though Jackson consistently refused to give a concise explanation of The Lottery, she did tell a friend that the story has to do with anti-Semitism.[29]

The scapegoating the Nazis employed on this colossal scale was an outcome of the ideological (mis)appropriation of Germany’s mythological heritage. The original concept was grounded in the idea that a proper nation, or Volk, requires a particular holistic unity. This totality must be comprised of a natural environment, a language and history rooted in a deep past and rural population, and the expression of that history in an indigenous mythology. The culture that emerged from this sentiment became radicalized, crystallizing as völkisch nationalism in the first third of the 20^th century. [30] Anyone perceived as not fulfilling all aspects of this unity was painted as an enemy. And in an effort to “purify” the Volk, those deemed outsiders were targeted. Though Jews were considered the primary enemy, the Romani people and a number of other groups were also among those who collectively fulfilled the role of scapegoat.[31]

Jackson’s story echoes the reported experience of Holocaust survivors in several respects. Let’s start with the hard truth that children are not exempt in either scenario. Like the little girl who wore the red coat in the film Schindler’s List, Davy Hutchinson is at risk as much as everybody else. And that reality is about as disturbing and heart wrenching as it gets.

But more significant in terms of The Lottery’s narrative and its structure, is the fact that the ritual murder in The Lottery is alluded to, although not seen by the reader. Like the execution of survivors’ family members, the act of stoning in The Lottery isn’t witnessed directly. Consequently, in both instances, the focus becomes the very personal experience of the selection process, which needless to say determines between “death or reprieve.”[32] Which is why everyone sighs when little Davy’s paper was blank.

The Lottery’s narrative is the selection process. Jackson’s story is essentially a detailed description of the mechanics of the village’s lottery. And the following high points of that process sound an awful lot like the frequent selections that took place in concentration camps. Flanked by Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin, Mr. Summers declares the lottery open. “A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared this throat and looked at the list. ‘All ready?’ he called.”[33] Once it was determined that this year’s victim would come from the Hutchinson household, each member of the family is called forth as they anxiously draw their individual lots.

This scenario is strikingly similar to the selection process Elie Weisel recounts in Night, the autobiographical account of his experience in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald:

 Three SS officers surrounded the notorious Dr. Mengele, the very same who had received us in Birkenau. The Blockälteste [barracks leader] attempted a smile. He asked us: “Ready?” Yes, we were ready. So were the SS doctors. Dr. Mengele was holding a list: our numbers. He nodded to the Blockälteste: we can begin! As if this were a game… I had one thought: not to have my number taken down and not to show my left arm.[34]

There are enough accounts of the numerous and varied atrocities visited upon the people that comprise the Nazis’ collective scapegoat to fill a library, and they have. Yet, Weisel’s testimony to what occurred in the camps makes it clear that the most terrible word, the one feared more than any other, was selection.[35] Jackson’s villagers must feel the same way about the term lottery.
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The Lottery’s Deteriorating Ritual.

Jackson points out that the original box the villagers used for the lottery had been “lost long ago.” The fact that it was lost, rather than destroyed by termites for example or burned in a barn fire, suggests that over time the villagers have been turning away from the antiquated pagan beliefs this ritual is clearly grounded in. There was once a ritual salute. The lottery official no longer stands “just so.” He doesn’t sing the “tuneless chant” anymore.[36] And at one time there might have been something about him walking among the people… maybe. But these days, the lottery is something to be rushed through so everyone can “get home for noon dinner.”

This evolution of the village’s ritual reveals that the appearance of progress in society is an illusion. Letting go of antiquated pagan beliefs makes it appear that the people in the village have become more enlightened. But, they haven’t. As Jackson put it, “although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”[37] The point being, though the villagers have let go of most aspects of this pagan ritual they are not actually more civilized. The brutality at its core remains fully intact. And to drive that point home, what the tradition has evolved into, is simply an excuse for violence.

The most damning thing about this situation is that collectively, the townspeople could bring the lottery to an end. But, like the citizens of Salem who get drawn into the cycle of accusation rather than question church tradition, they don’t. They perpetuate this annual murder by teaching it to the younger generations. Someone not only helps Davy Hutchinson draw his slip of paper, they place stones in his little hand. And they do so simply for the sake of upholding tradition. We know this is the only motivation for continuing the lottery, because Old Man Warner’s only response to Mrs. Adams’ suggestion to give it up is nothing more substantial than, “there’s always been a lottery.”[38]
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In Conclusion

It’s no accident that Jackson chose stoning rather than a modern, mechanized method of ritual murder à la Nazi Germany, or the hanging employed in The Salem Witch Trials for that matter. She elected to use stoning, because pelting someone to death with rocks is as primitive as it gets. The symbolism is double-edged. Stoning not only speaks to the antiquity of the scapegoat tradition, most importantly it’s a statement about the current state of humanity. Jackson’s choice of stoning is her not too subtle way of saying we’re just as savage as we ever were.

Jackson paints a pretty dismal picture. She seems to be saying that these villagers (and by that she means the whole of humankind) will never be free of their primitive nature. At least, not until enough of them have been affected adversely enough by the horror of their tradition that they reject it and, as Mrs. Adams implies, destroy the box altogether. Or they fashion a new box, one that reflects their current social conditions and sustains them rather than pitting them against each other.[39] Until that happens, Tessie Hutchinson may be the only loser, but no one is a winner.