"They both began to laugh" 'In The Lottery and Other Stories, Jackson's children do not recoil from cruelty but learn to enjoy it.' Do you agree?

Set against the cheerful surfaces of postwar small-town America, Shirley Jackson's 1949 short-story collection The Lottery and Other Stories examines how children learn not merely to witness cruelty but to enjoy it. As the children of "The Renegade" hear a neighbour's casual verdict on a family pet and "began to laugh", Jackson confirms to a significant extent that her young do not recoil from cruelty but learn to enjoy it¹, even while she traces that enjoyment to the adults who perform cruelty first. Ultimately, despite the occasional flicker of childish feeling, Jackson shows children so thoroughly schooled to enjoy cruelty that the pleasure becomes their own.

From the outset, Jackson exposes the adult example that teaches children to enjoy cruelty, a pattern enacted first as private self-deception in "The Daemon Lover" and then as the polite tyranny of "Of Course". That private self-coercion finds its surface in "The Daemon Lover", where the lonely protagonist's insistence that "this is my wedding day"² summons a marriage that exists only in her speech, a fantasy the author casts as the point where social expectation hardens into private compulsion. Here, the author develops the motif of self-erasure through her reminder that she is "thirty-four years old after all", exposing how the calendar itself operates as a coercive instrument³ that renders inventing a fiancé less shameful than admitting she is alone. Setting the protagonist's pleading that "it's very important" against the town's incredulous indifference, Jackson presents the gap between private urgency and public disbelief as the divide that isolates her. Contextualising this collapse within the postwar expectation that a woman's respectability depends on marriage, the author contrasts the "overly pretty" costume of the bride-role the woman rejects with her buried sense that "there's more than you think" to her inward life, capturing how conformity demands the erasure of any self that refuses the assigned part. By rendering the protagonist complicit in her own deception, Jackson insists that the pleasure children take in cruelty begins with the self-deception adults model for them⁴, the internalised conviction that marriage is mandatory doing the culture's work for it. Just as Jackson makes the protagonist of "The Daemon Lover" perform her own deception, the author turns outward to neighbours who perform theirs over the garden fence, the example children watch moving from private to spoken. The author names that public courtesy as the mechanism of conformity in "Of Course", figuring each polite "of course" as a small surrender of preference⁵ that superficially agrees while quietly sealing the speaker's entrapment. Indeed, Jackson exposes the involuntary duty of neighbourly obligation through Mrs Harris's declaration that her family "do not go to movies", where even a simple cinema outing is framed as intellectual decline to enforce the cursory sense of superiority. Setting Mrs Harris's expressed wish that "I do so hope we'll be friends"⁶ against Mrs Tylor's inability to refuse, the author frames the language of companionship as the instrument of control. Addressing this friction within the suburban expectation that a good neighbour never gives offence, Jackson contrasts Mrs Harris's self-serving pursuit of a "really peaceful life" with her dismissal of popular culture as "intellectually retarding", capturing how conformity is enforced through the fear of seeming rude. Through this cordial ambush the author reveals that cruelty needs no tyrant when children are watching⁷, the politeness adults perform teaching the young that coercion is simply good manners. In doing so, Jackson shows cruelty becoming the example children learn to enjoy, so ordinary that it passes for good manners.