Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy

Abstract

In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.

Keywords

sympathy / empathy / moral agency / literature / woman / Lu Xun / Shirley Jackson

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Brill