Everyone knows that feelings are perfectly natural and okay, but they’re also very important to have in order for a society to function well. Shirley Jackson demonstrates this in her short story “The Lottery”, in which every year, a small town picks by lottery one person to stone to death.

In the story, a woman named Tessie Hutchinson is selected in the lottery. When she is selected she fights it, saying that it isn’t fair and isn’t right. Everyone, even her family, is deaf to her protests and proceeds to stone her anyway, no qualms about it, because it’s a tradition. This shows that these people are detached from the concept of death and the feelings that surround it, and the emotions of other people. Though undoubtedly people die of natural causes outside of the lottery, the townsfolk feel nothing and think nothing of it, as is shown by the unhesitating murder of Tessie. They lack empathy, and don’t have much attachment or real feeling towards one another at all.

However, Tessie isn’t exempt from this absence of feeling. Tessie does protest when she is picked, but until then, she was calmly chatting with her neighbors like she would had she met them at the grocery store. To all of them, this yearly execution is a normal event, just something to do and be over with, like grocery shopping.

This lack of feeling is also self-sustaining. If the parents lack attachment, empathy, and real feeling, so will the children. When Tessie’s family is drawn in the lottery and she realizes she might die, she tries to volunteer her married daughter’s family in her place. And near the end of the story, just before the stoning begins, it is shown that the adults and the children have stones, and somebody gives her little son, who needed help to draw a paper from the lottery box, a stone too.

There is no doubt that a society that meaninglessly, thoughtlessly kills its innocents and forces the children of the one to die to participate- and teaches them that there is nothing wrong about it- is very, very messed up, and in this story’s case all of it stems from the lack of attachment and real feeling between the townspeople. Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that emotions are good and functional, natural and important- but should not be given control, lest the story starts to twist the other way.