Shirley Jackson's Scapegoats : The Scapegoat Mechanism in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and "The Lottery"

Shirley Jackson’s writing often deals with the subject of marginalized characters and the theme of the scapegoat. Rene Girard argued that societies need the scapegoat in order to control violence and form a unity. This essay discusses the scapegoat mechanism in two of Jackson’s most famous works, “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and shows how the figure of the scapegoat functions differently in the two narratives. In “The Lottery” the process is laid bare by an omniscient narrator while in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the narrator is a scapegoat as well as a creator of scapegoats. The essay also examines how the scapegoat mechanism turns the characters into either passive objects or active subjects.