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7/13/2010 7:33:57 PM
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AHMM Editorial
Posts 45
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So I have been obsessed lately by the causes and effects of bullying in a community. I don’t mean the schoolyard pushing and shoving that terrorized timid kids like me. I mean the insidious ways adults can bully an individual in a group. We’ve all seen it in some form or another. We’ve heard someone being gossiped about or slandered, or witnessed someone being ostracized. Or perhaps even felt the sting ourselves of these actions at one time or another.
Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” keeps popping into my head when I think of this. I assume most of you have read her story in junior or high school. It’s a story that is at once familiar and strange, and she manages to capture these two aspects simultaneously and subtly when she sets the scene: “the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” The scene is just a little . . . over the top. It’s painterly. Dizzingly beautiful. The people who begin to gather are charming and quaint. The men talk about “planting and rain, tractors and taxes.” The women wear “faded housedresses and sweaters” and “soft laughter” ripples through the crowd.
Published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker (the story takes place on June 27), this story of a barbaric rite set in Small Town, America was immediately controversial. An uncomfortable number of people cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in response to the story. But even a half century later, the story hasn’t lost its power or relevance at all. When we think of small town, rural America—at least when I do—we think of safe neighborhoods where everyone knows each other, of church suppers and casseroles, and warm community sentiment. But Shirley Jackson captures both the cloyingly cozy aspect of small town life, and a dark underside of a community held together by its ritual scapegoating or sacrifice of a randomly selected individual. One character in Jackson’s story, old man Warner, describes the lottery as a community’s line between civilization and “living in caves.” In fact, the lottery is more than a holiday, it’s a civic duty.
I’ve been thinking about bullies because I’ve witnessed something that made me uncomfortable, that I didn’t – still don’t – fully understand. The sacrifice or scapegoating in the story and the bullying I witnessed are two sides of the same coin. In “The Lottery,” the victim was chosen at random, in bullying the victim is targeted. In both cases, it seems to me, there is something irrational, primal in what drives the aggressors.
We talk about motive in murder mysteries as if killing is some sort of rational act. A simple, oblique story like “The Lottery” talks to us across time, and seems to crystallize, for me, those dark, irrational forces at work within human society.
What other stories does “The Lottery” make you think of? Do you know any stories that deal with bullying?
Linda Landrigan
Editor, AHMM
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7/14/2010 12:57:21 AM
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Leigh
Posts 211
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The horror fringe of sci-fi has explored this topic a few times. David Pinner's Ritual comes to mind, which was made into the film, Wicker Man.
I associate the title of Children of the Corn so closely with Tom Tryon, I tend to forget his earlier story is titled Harvest Home.
_______________________
It took me a long time to realize girls can be cruel, perhaps more deeply cruel than boys. Whenever I hear of a death by bullying, it breaks my heart. The audacity of parents to blame the victim (as in the recent case of the girl who recently moved to his country) outrages me.
Even lesser degrees of bullying can leave deep psychological scars. I've encouraged an author friend to consider a juvenile or YA novel centered around bullying. She's reluctant to shift to non-adult, but I'm convinced she could write a winner.
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7/14/2010 3:03:42 AM
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Tog
Posts 146
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Leigh wrote:
It took me a long time to realize girls can be cruel, perhaps more deeply cruel than boys. Whenever I hear of a death by bullying, it breaks my heart. The audacity of parents to blame the victim (as in the recent case of the girl who recently moved to his country) outrages me.
I've always thought girls made better bullies. At the very least, more effective ones. A boy will bully through threat and intimidation, but a girl is more subtle (usually). In school, there were a lot of girls I stayed away from for that very reason. A boy will walk up and slug you. A girl will spread rumors about you for weeks before you know about them.
And, yeah, I wish there was an easy fix for bullying. That girl you mentioned was tragic, and I think the girls that drove her to it should be charged with involuntary manslaughter at the very least. It's a really gray area though, with no real laws to cover it and no real way to enforce them without getting into the "thought police" aspects. The girls that drove her to it probably had no intention of it getting to that point. What bothers me is the thought that some didn't seem to care that it did.
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7/14/2010 4:06:09 AM
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Yoshinori Todo
Posts 232
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AHMM Editorial wrote:
What other stories does “The Lottery” make you think of? Do you know any stories that deal with bullying?
Stephen King's Carrie comes immediately to mind. Also, because it's still on my mind, "The Edge" by Agatha Christie is also about bullying, in a way.
--
Josh
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7/23/2010 4:33:18 PM
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aw!tte
Posts 10
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Seems like Columbine set in motion the impulse for lots of folks to write about the effects of bullying on a victim who sort of snaps under the pressure and reacts violently. Jodi Picoult wrote a book called Nineteen Minutes that deals with that, kind of. Not exactly the same thing that you were talking about, but still...
There is an excellent book called Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre about the friend of someone who had committed a school shooting, and the aftermath he suffered when the media descends on his town and him.
Finally, though it turns out to have very little to do with bullying, I would totally endorse the book Columbine by David Cullen-- the non-fiction account published last year. So good and so interesting and so not the story we were sold on TV. Totally worth a read... though it has nothing to do with the original question.
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7/23/2010 4:34:38 PM
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aw!tte
Posts 10
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Yoshinori Todo wrote:
AHMM Editorial wrote: What other stories does “The Lottery” make you think of? Do you know any stories that deal with bullying?
Stephen King's Carrie comes immediately to mind. Also, because it's still on my mind, "The Edge" by Agatha Christie is also about bullying, in a way.
I could be too wrapped up in the school shooting aspect of bullying, but Stephen King's story "Rage" is also an interesting look at teen frustration and anxiety gone amok.
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7/24/2010 4:34:37 AM
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Yoshinori Todo
Posts 232
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aw!tte wrote:
I could be too wrapped up in the school shooting aspect of bullying, but Stephen King's story "Rage" is also an interesting look at teen frustration and anxiety gone amok.
Yes. Some people even claimed that Rage might have been partly responsible for a school shooting incident, as a copy of it was discovered in one of the perpetrator's possessions. Anyway, when he learned that, Stephen King decided to let the book fall out of print.
--
Josh
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