I’m guest lecturing in a friend’s creative writing class tonight, and the stories she has assigned are two I’m very familiar with: “The Lottery” and “The Necklace.” In preparation, I am reviewing them this morning.
What strikes me most, looking at them side by side, is how both hinge on transformation.
In “The Lottery,” it is the reader’s dawning realization that this is no harmless community gathering. The tone shifts under our feet. And the woman, (spoiler) as she is being stoned, says it’s not fair, though we understand she has likely participated in the tradition until now.
Jackson gives us almost nothing to soften the blow, pardon the terrible pun. No explanation, no moral framing. Why do they do this? We are left to speculate. Population control, ritual, something old and unquestioned. We hear that other villages are abandoning the practice, but the older generation dismisses that as foolishness.
So we are left with that icecube-down-the-back-of-the-neck sensation as we realize what this lottery (not one you want to win) is.
Word Raccoon covered her eyes and cried out when she got it.
(When I first learned the premise of The Hunger Games, I immediately thought of “The Lottery.” I might bring that up tonight, though I am not entirely sure the reference still lands. Do students still know it?)
Oh, right. Transformation.
In “The Necklace,” it is our understanding that shifts as we realize (spoiler again), along with Mathilde, that the lost necklace was costume jewelry all along.
WR moaned and pitched a fit and asked what is wrong with people. She also wants to ask why people write such stories, but if she does, I will point her right back to her own poetry, so…
This story must have left an impression on my mother when she read it in junior high, because she told it to me as I was growing up. I remember being excited to encounter the original later, as if I were meeting a story I already knew in a more formal setting.
Transformation again, but of a different kind.
What stayed with me was the danger of requiring external validation and wealth. It is one thing to enjoy admiration. It is another to depend on it. Mathilde’s desire to appear as something she is not sets the entire tragedy in motion. Had she not placed herself in that position, she might have been spared a decade of labor for something that had already, quite literally, vanished.
And what vanishes with it is not just money, but youth, beauty, possibility.
We watch her hopes dissolve, but also her physical self. Time does what time does, but here it feels accelerated, almost punitive. Reality does not simply arrive. It crashes.
Word Raccoon is shaking her head mightily. She does not approve of superficiality, especially when she sees the heartache that can ensue.
A passing stranger recently admired a piece of her jewelry, something that looks more expensive than it is, and she immediately corrected the impression. Costume jewelry, she said, kindly but firmly. Oh no, we are not wearing thousands of dollars on our fingers.
We do not require such things. We do not ask for them. We do not need them. We do not particularly enjoy being the caretakers of valuable objects either, especially since we are still looking for a pink ice necklace we lost decades ago, not to mention a ruby ring. Sigh.
Mathilde begins with so little, yet insists on performing a life she does not have. That insistence, call it ambition, call it longing, call it illusion, ultimately crushes her. Her penalty, however, seems harsh.
So what are we meant to take away?
Perhaps that is the wrong question.
I am interested in how these stories work on us as readers.
Word Raccoon is taking this all in, as she is more accustomed to poetry. She says if I do not read “Renewal” to this class tonight instead of one of my short stories, she might disown me. I have to agree with her that the poem leans a little dystopian. A little Hunger Games, perhaps.
What I begin to notice, looking at these two stories together, is that they do not handle transformation in the same way at all.
In “The Necklace,” transformation is something the character lives through. It takes time. Years, in fact. We watch Mathilde descend into a life she never imagined for herself, one shaped by labor, deprivation, and the slow erosion of the self she once believed she possessed. The change is gradual, almost procedural. Cause leads to effect, and effect compounds. By the end, the transformation feels inevitable, even if the final revelation quietly rearranges everything we thought we understood.
In “The Lottery,” the transformation is not lived so much as revealed.
The village does not change. The ritual does not change. The people do not change, at least not in any visible way. What changes is our understanding. We move from curiosity to unease to something much worse, and it happens quickly. The shift takes place not in the world of the story, but in us.
Word Raccoon would like to point out that this is extremely rude. She was covering her eyes by the story’s end, and I do not blame her.
You think you are attending a small-town gathering. You are not. You think you understand the rules. You do not. And by the time you catch up, it is too late to feel comfortable again.
That distinction feels important.
One story asks what happens when a character makes a choice and has to live with it.
The other asks what happens when we realize, too late, what kind of world we have been observing.
In one, transformation is the result of time and consequence.
In the other, transformation is the result of recognition.
And this may be why something like “it was all a dream” would feel so unsatisfying in these stories. It tries to undo the transformation instead of completing it. It returns everyone to where they started, as if nothing has been risked or changed, and Word Raccoon refuses to accept a refund on emotional investment.
But both of these stories refuse that kind of escape.
Mathilde cannot return to who she was before the necklace was lost. Even the final revelation does not restore her youth or her ease or her illusions. If anything, it sharpens the loss.
Word Raccoon still finds her hackles rising at the premise of that story. A young wife wants one night of beauty and pays for it for the rest of her life? Maupassant, she says, we need to talk.
And in “The Lottery,” there is no return at all. Once we understand what is happening, we cannot unknow it. The story ends, but the recognition stays with us, unsettled and difficult to shake.
So perhaps transformation, at its most effective, is not about change for its own sake, but about irreversibility.
Something shifts, and the shift holds. The character cannot go back. The reader cannot go back.
And whatever has been revealed, whether slowly over years or all at once in a single moment, remains.
Word Raccoon, having rifled through all available drawers, agrees that if you are going to change something, you should at least have the decency to let it stick.
Now, am I ready for tonight? WR is more concerned with what she’s wearing. Vain beast. Did you learn nothing from “The Necklace,” WR?
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