Hangsaman, a Reverse Bildungsroman
I will never not be fascinated by Shirley Jackson
I am once again in awe of how Shirley Jackson masterfully creates sinister tension through a mask of ordinariness.
I’ve read her second novel Hangsaman three times in a month now and I’m still perplexed at her ability to make the most unnerving story through the most mundane events. As I read, I tried to understand the genre and found myself torn between coming-of-age, given how it watches seventeen-year-old Natalie’s journey into college, or possibly a character study a mental deterioration, as her delusions become increasingly vivid and her daydreams indistinguishable from her reality. As I write this, I think I’ve settled on the latter; this novel is a reverse bildungsroman, watching the psychological deterioration of our protagonist as she eases into adulthood.
The story somehow unravels without going anywhere, like unraveling a spool of yarn until there is nothing left. My first instinct was to say that Shirley Jackson accomplished this simply through magic but upon closer inspection, I think she achieves this through a mundane plot combined with a sinister atmosphere. The story is, simply, of a young girl who goes to college and finds herself. But her world exists in a dense atmosphere of isolation. Natalie is lonely, sheltered, and finding her way through an inimical world.
A very Jackson-esque trait is creating tension by placing a dark twist on ordinary circumstances. From the beginning pages, Natalie is shown to frequently daydream. This initially seems to set up her creative mind, until her daydreams turn on her, accusatory voices questioning her about her alibi and demanding she account for herself. She is unbothered by this twist, but readers are jarred as she imagines a detective asking her, “How do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?”(Jackson 5.) Most of her daydreams frequently include a detective accusing her of murder. These daydreams come on compulsively, suggesting it’s a habit. There is no connection made between the accusing voice and herself until several chapters later, when college girls ask her if she’s a virgin. “I won’t answer”(Jackson 62) she says, echoing her frequent retorts to the imaginary detective. This shows that internally and externally, Natalie always believes she is being interrogated, scrutinized, and judged. This isolated her from her surroundings, leaving her closed off from everyone around her.
Her relationship with her father is also tinged with sinister undertones. He frequently belittles Natalie’s mother to her, isolating her from the rest of the household and he holds tight control over Natalie’s life, proud and possessive of her mind. Though he presents this as a father tending to his daughter’s writing habits, the letters they write to each other are wrought with sexual implication. When she’s away in college, he writes “‘My dear captive princess, it is as much as any knight can do, these days, to keep in touch with his captive princesses”(Jackson 136) and she writes back “‘dear Sir Knight, it was not you, then, caroling lustily under my window these three nights past? Nor one of your emissaries?”(Jackson 137.) These sexual connotations dance around the idea that there has been sexual abuse between them, leaving the reader constantly holding their breath for a revelation that never comes.
Even the implied sexual trauma that triggers Natalie's increasingly strange psychological break isn’t presented directly to the readers. Instead, it jumps over and we see Natalie wake up burning with shame, whimpering, “no, please no”‘ (Jackson 43) before insisting to herself “nothing happened … nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. … I don’t remember. I will not think about it” (Jackson 44.) Natalie forces herself to repress the memory, believing that that will help her survive. She goes downstairs with a bruised face and no one in her family comments. Her father wishes a good morning and readers, recalling that it was her father’s friend who assaulted her, cringe. Natalie wishes everyone a good morning, inwardly thinking, “if she spoke, she would tell them what had happened; not because she had so much desire to tell, but because this was not a personal manifestation, but had changed them all in changing the world, in the sense that they only existed in Natatlie’s imagination anyway”(Jackson 45.) The thought is long and exhausting, filled with interjections and confusions; it’s the mind of someone who is falling apart.
In the final segment of the book, Natalie has a complete break from reality. She runs off with her friend Tony. She and Tony’s relationship begins with sapphic undertones, as they spend the night and shower together, before skipping school and boarding a bus together. They ride the bus to the woods and the reader is eerily reminded of the moment when Natalie was assaulted in the woods by her father’s friend. Natalie begins to wildly believe that Tony is trying to kill her and when this is coupled with the violence Natalie experiences at the beginning of the novel and her obsessive thoughts over death, Jackson has groomed readers to expect the worst. But Natalie leaves Tony and is picked up by a couple who worry about the dangers of a woman walking along the trails out of town. Even as she’s safe, Jackson preoccupies readers with what might be.As she returns to her college campus, she looks at the campus and smiles. “As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grownup, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (Jackson 218) reads the final line of this story. Yet there is something hollow about her growth; she abandoned the friend she had and the possibilities of happiness to return to this hostile campus. By the last page, she has not grown but rather became a more definitive version of the Natalie from the first page: lonely, sheltered, returning to her hostile world.
Work Cited
Jackson, Shirley. The Road Through The Wall. 2nd ed., Farrar, Straus, 1948.