The Monstrous “We”: The Society as the Ultimate Gothic Creature in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

In most cases of Gothic literature, the monster is portrayed as a freakishly different entity that inhabits the human world. Nevertheless, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery declines such a conception of the monster and goes much further, endorsing the monstrousness of a Society. In this chapter, the monster acquires no supernatural connotations; rather, it becomes a self-sustaining organism composed of integrated citizens. The monster depicted here is a degraded collective, one led by the black box of tradition and operating through the mechanism of a hive mind, which renders individual moral agency invisible under the weight of the whole. Moreover, the study conducted investigates the representation of such a ‘Social Monster’, as it questions the ways the monster/method of horror produces evil through the banality of evil, which includes the use of administrative bureaucracy and civic order to mask the ritual of killing. In fact, the monster’s gratification consists in only one thing: the maintenance of homeostasis and, though only in the name of an antiquated belief, blood as the indispensable medium of exchange. Moreover, the present study highlights the Gothic relevance of such a monster and argues that the Social Monster typifies a dark allegory of systemic complicity for our time. It portrays a world in which institutional violence has become normal and collective, cruelly, yet mercilessly, sacrifices the individual to keep the status quo. Eventually, the text uncovers that the real Gothic terror is not something dark lurking, but the faceless, stone-throwing crowd that society becomes when tradition prevails over humanity.