Author Bio: Margaret Toth is a Professor of English and the Director of Film Studies at Manhattan College. Her research interests include twentieth century U.S. literature, film, and adaptation studies. She has published in such journals as Adaptation, The Journal of Narrative Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, and Legacy as well as in multiple edited collections. She co-directed, with Margaret (Jay) Jessee, the conference Edith Wharton’s New York (2020) and has served on the Executive Board of the Edith Wharton Society for multiple terms. 

Initial reviews of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951) described the novel as “strange” (Publishers’ Weekly, 56), “confusing” (Derleth, Chicago Daily Tribune, B6), and even “exasperat[ing]” (Miller, Antioch Review, 239). Comparing the novel unfavorably to “The Lottery,” August Derleth claimed that Hangsaman “fall[s] short” because its “story and, in large part, [Jackson’s] central characters are seen as thru a glass darkly” (B6). In other words, readers, even when they look closely, don’t see Natalie Waite, the novel’s protagonist, clearly; rather, Natalie’s experiences—and Natalie herself—remain opaque.

To Derleth’s point, many of the key scenes in the three-part novel are ambiguous. Natalie, the daughter of an arrogant professor and an alcoholic stay-at-home mother, is a first-year student struggling to adjust to college life. Readers gather that her difficulty stems, at least in part, from the fact that she was sexually assaulted by her father’s friend soon before arriving on campus, though Jackson only describes the incident obliquely. Natalie finally meets a friend, Tony, toward the end of the novel’s second act. However, the two young women first encounter each other in a nighttime episode laden with oneiric overtones; indeed, at first it appears as though Natalie, desperate for connection, is merely dreaming about Tony. Just as readers regain their bearings with Natalie and Tony—as they spend time together in waking hours, bonding over, among other things, a disdain for their shallow peers—other, deeply fundamental questions begin to creep in. Can others see and interact with Tony? Is Tony, in fact, real? Tony, the reader ultimately understands, is a product of Natalie’s imagination. In Derleth’s view, Jackson’s failure to “[distinguish] between Natalie’s material existence and her psychic state” is the novel’s greatest shortcoming. Nolan Miller, writing for the Antioch Review, echoes Derleth’s sentiments, saying, “we need to know where we are with the facts” (239). “Miss Jackson,” he goes on to complain, “doesn’t play fair” (239).

What the early reviews reveal, over and over, is a discomfort with what I call boundary confusion, not just with respect to Natalie/Tony but also awake/asleep, experienced/dreamed, real/imaginary, logical/illogical, and external/internal.[1] Jackson repeatedly troubles such binaries, instead setting the novel’s key moments in the in-between spaces, what we might think of as the site of the forward slash itself. Put differently, Jackson renders that in-between space both legible and replete, wrenching apart the binaries to make room for experiences that fall outside of—or, more appropriately, in between—socially sanctioned categories. Taken altogether, these “narratively indeterminate events” disrupt reading practices, thereby introducing what James Dobson has described as “epistemological uncertainty” (120).[2]

In this essay, I explore yet another boundary confusion that produces destabilization, this one related to genre. Hangsaman refuses to conform to rigid generic categories, instead combining tropes from multiple genres. Critics have analyzed Hangsaman’s indebtedness to multiple traditions, including the Gothic romance, the campus novel, the bildungsroman (and, even more precisely, the künstlerroman), and folk horror. However, despite the fact that Natalie spends the entirety of the first act of Hangsaman picturing herself as a suspect within a crime novel—complete with an imaginary sleuth who delivers cliche lines in clipped noir speech (“What if I told you you were seen?” [7]; “Let us go over the sequence of events once more” [37])—scholars have overlooked the novel’s engagement with crime and detective fiction.[3] In what follows, I situate Hangsaman within a discourse of midcentury crime fiction.

In the 1940s and 1950s, writers like Helen Eustis, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar, and others were developing a unique approach to crime writing. Dispensing with the stock character types and familiar plots found within both hardboiled fiction (jaded investigators, femme fatales, criminal underworlds) and mystery cozies (genteel detectives, locked-room whodunits), they instead offer intense portraits of women’s interior states. Their novels, which center women’s experiences, examine themes of repression, split personalities, sexual desire, and trauma. Jackson, I argue, takes a similar approach in Hangsaman. However, although works like Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) or Millar’s Beast in View (1955) resonate with Hangsaman in many ways—both focus on young women’s experiences and explore dissociative identity disorder—they ultimately reify binaries and, by extension, problematic stereotypes of gender and sexuality. Jackson’s novel, by contrast, embraces fluidity and flexibility, thereby presenting a trenchant critique of patriarchal and heterosexist norms.

By examining Jackson within the context of midcentury crime fiction, I don’t aim to pin down the novel or to suggest that Jackson doesn’t draw liberally from other genres. Rather, I propose that reading the novel through this lens—and with an eye toward genres and their tropes more generally—reveals how the gaps and in between spaces of Hangsaman are sites of production. More specifically, Jackson uses these interspaces to work out the relationships between trauma, narrative, and survival.

 That Jackson was “written out of literary history” after her death has become a commonplace observation in Jackson criticism (Carpenter 143). Scholars exploring why this has happened frequently cite genre issues, noting that Jackson’s writing presents a categorization problem. For one, largely due to the popularity of “The Lottery” (1948) and later, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Jackson was pigeonholed as a writer of Gothic horror, with critics and literary historians neglecting her rich, diverse oeuvre. As Melanie Anderson explains, a “focus on Jackson’s predilection for the gothic has eclipsed the actual variety of her writing and led to critics examining her work through a limited number of texts” (“Introduction” 2). Moreover, Jackson’s “versatility” itself, the primary “reason behind her commercial success and prominence during her lifetime,” might have led directly to her “critical neglect afterwards” (Murphy 279). It has been difficult, Bernice Murphy implies, to build an easily digestible narrative about Jackson and her writing. Finally, Jackson’s stories, novels, and essays tend to fall within marginalized genres— not merely the Gothic but also supernatural tales, domestic musings, and humor sketches—that often aren’t considered worthy of serious critical analysis. In short, then, genre problems have plagued Jackson’s legacy, limiting her place within both the public imagination and the scholarship.

Even Jackson’s most beloved works raise questions regarding genre. Readers of early drafts of The Haunting of Hill House, for example, were perplexed: “I can’t figure out what she wants to do with the story. Mystery? Spoof? Psychomystery? Gothic horror?” (qtd. in Hattenhauer 169). Hangsaman prompts similar doubts. Is it folk horror, a campus novel, or a Gothic romance? Is it a magical coming of age tale, or a work of psychological realism? While critics can and have built cases in different directions—see Dobson’s excellent essay on Hangsaman as a campus novel, for instance—the answer, finally, is all of them. The novel refuses to be—or to be labeled—one singular thing.

Jackson’s genre play sheds light on some of the most critical subjects in the novel, including Natalie’s sexual assault, the aftermath of her trauma, and her subsequent identity crisis. Moreover, Hangsaman is, at heart, a novel about story itself. Jackson—via Natalie, an aspiring author—provides a sustained meta-commentary on such issues as artistic inspiration, writing processes, and genre conventions. Natalie pens exercises and letters for and to her father, college compositions, and private journal entries, many of which are interpolated into the novel. And these are just the words she puts down on the page. Natalie also keeps up a running narration in her mind, positioning herself as a character within a variety of stories from different genres. Dobson notes this, pointing to the role that story-making plays in Natalie’s evolving identity: “Jackson represents Natalie’s interiority, her sense of self, as a developing set of narratives. […] Natalie is foremost a writer and the extent to which she has control over her own narratives is crucial to Jackson’s representation of her development” (120). In other words, Natalie works through various formative experiences—both positive and negative ones—by narrativizing them.

The main story Natalie imagines herself within is the detective narrative that drives part one of the novel, but it is important note that it isn’t the only one. In parts two and three, Natalie pictures herself in other narratives, the genre shifting to accommodate both her external experiences and her internal desires and fears. For example, when she meets her professor Arthur Langdon, she initially has “vague daydreams” featuring dialogue that might have been lifted off the pages of romance fiction: “‘Miss Waite? I don’t suppose you remember me. Well, I’m Arthur Langdon; I want to tell you that your performance of Portia was . . .’” (76, ellipses original). Later, when she’s sharing her story-making with Tony, Natalie imagines herself as a character in an espionage story. The two young women sit inside a busy cafeteria, examining the other patrons and guessing which one might be a fellow spy:

“Do you suppose she got the jewels?” Natalie asked. “And the papers and the guns?”

“Do you suppose that extraordinary woman on the other side is looking for us? What will the message be? . . .”

“I believe it’s the boy in the black cap; he seems to have lost something. Or the old man there with the cheese sandwich.” (195)

This spy tale, full of mischief and humor, is situational, conjured to heighten their off-campus adventure. Indeed, this whole in-town episode emphasizes stories of heroism, bravado, and danger, perhaps best exemplified in the movie house posters that Natalie and Tony examine, one for a Western and the other for a monster horror flick (191-2).

Sometimes the story-making moves beyond the situational and into the existential, with the stories functioning not to intensify Natalie’s experiences but to explain them. In the closing pages of part two, for instance, Natalie imagines herself inside a speculative narrative that, with its science fiction and horror trappings, anticipates classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, particularly “Perchance to Dream” (27 Nov. 1959) and “Eye of the Beholder” (11 Nov. 1960). At this point in the novel, Natalie has just literally and symbolically rejected her overbearing father, writing him a letter to explain that she won’t be coming home for a visit he’d arranged. Immediately after embedding Natalie’s apologetic letter, Jackson writes: “Perhaps—and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her—suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Wait, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else?” (150). This ushers in Natalie’s speculative narrative, in which she realizes that what she understood to be her entire life—“from the day she could first remember (running through the grass, calling, ‘Daddy? Daddy?’)” —has actually been someone else’s dream about the future, experienced in “no more than a split second” (150).

In this story, “Natalie” isn’t Natalie at all, but rather someone under anesthesia—“an old woman . . . or a child having its tonsils removed, or a woman with twelve children having a charity operation, or a man”—who lives in an earlier time period (150). This unidentified person has been “dreaming [Natalie’s] world, so when she awoke she might say, amused, to the nurse, to the girl in the room next door, to the police, ‘Listen to what I dreamed; I dreamed there was a war; I dreamed there was a thing called television; I dreamed—listen to this—that there was something called an atom bomb. An atom bomb—I don’t know; I tell you I dreamed it’” (151, emphases original). This story, perhaps more than any other within the novel, reveals Natalie’s crisis of identity. In an effort to redefine herself outside of her relationship to her father, Natalie can only imagine a fantastical narrative in which she no longer exists, with the reference to cataclysmic technologies of warfare, like the atom bomb, gesturing toward the violence of this self-erasure.

While this motif of story-making runs throughout the novel, it is most evident in the first section, where Natalie imagines herself as a character in a crime drama of the hardboiled variety. This story is also the most sustained, running, albeit sporadically, for close to forty pages. The detective tale is motivated by both situational and existential concerns, and, like the unsettling story that concludes section two, bears directly on Natalie’s relationship with her father. What’s most compelling, perhaps, is the way that Jackson both deploys and reworks crime novel conventions in order to show how patriarchal power—whether in fiction or in real life—operates. She deftly delineates the contours of Natalie’s relationship with her father, who at points reads like an allegorical Patriarch, while also foreshadowing the sexual assault that occurs at the end of the section.

The crime story Natalie invents is in some respects unimaginative, with both the plot and diction borrowed from hardboiled writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In the story, someone has been murdered, and Natalie is under investigation for the crime; it isn’t until the story is underway that we begin to suspect that the murder victim is Natalie’s father. The story is told primarily through dialogue, as a detective cross-examines Natalie in familiar “noir-speak,” combining tactics of false flattery and ruthless bullying to get her to confess. This narrative begins in the very first scene of the novel. The Waite family—Mr. Waite, Mrs. Waite, Natalie, and her brother, Bud—have just finished breakfast, and as Mrs. Waite complains about the weekly cocktail party her husband insists upon hosting—a gathering for which she must do all the preparatory work—Natalie slips into a reverie: “Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice. ‘How,’ he asked pointedly, ‘Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?’” (5, emphasis original). Critics who have noted this moment and similar scenes from part one focus on the figure of the detective. Hattenhauer, for instance, sees him as “a double of [Natalie’s] father the inquisitor”: “while Arnold asks her questions about her writing, the detective interrogates her paternalistically” (104). Ibi Kaslik makes a similar claim, observing that Natalie’s “inner detective,” like her father, “badger[s] her, asking a series of pointless, unending queries” (176).

While these arguments about the detective are insightful, I want to focus more on Natalie’s performance in the crime drama. For while the detective’s “secret voice” sets the narrative in motion, Natalie’s answer, which immediately follows, reveals the place that story will come to occupy in Hangsaman: “‘I can’t tell,’ Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from her family the terror she hid also from the detective. ‘I refuse to say,’ she told him” (5). On the one hand, Natalie’s response simply establishes her role in this drama. She has killed her father, the patriarch, and she defies the representative of another patriarchal institution, the law, by refusing to confess. In other words, Natalie, resisting and non-compliant, accesses a power within this story that is denied to her in real life, something we see her do in many of the embedded stories. But on the other hand, and perhaps more significant, her response demonstrates the kind of boundary confusion I describe in the introduction, blurring internal/external, imaginary/real, and dreamed/experienced. The detective plot, rather than staying firmly on the side of the “internal,” “imagined,” or “dreamed,” as one might expect, instead folds into the “external,” “real,” and “experienced.” For example, both within the “imaginary” story and at the “real” breakfast table, Natalie lowers her eyes, so that the detective and her family won’t notice her fear. In other words, the narrative is happening in the space between, a point skillfully illustrated through Jackson’s sonic imagery. Natalie hears the detective’s harsh tone “through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice” (5).

There are many such moments in the first part of Hangsaman. When Natalie goes to her father’s study for the daily feedback session on her writing, the room warps. It is at once the space where her father is reading the exercise he has assigned to her and the space where, his body having been discovered, she stands with literal blood on her hands:

He read again, and Natalie looked around the study; the corpse would be over there, of course, between the bookcase with the books on demonology and the window, which had heavy drapes that could be pulled to hide any nefarious work. She would be found at the desk, not five feet away from the corpse, leaning one hand on the corner to support herself, her face white and distorted with screaming. She would be unable to account for the blood on her hands, on the front of her dress, on her shoes, the blood soaking through the carpet, at her feet, the blood under her hand on the desk, leaving a smeared mark on the papers there. (12)

The blood, which stains the pages of writing Natalie has produced for her father, functions as a symbol of both her rage and her own coming of age. As if seeing inside Natalie’s murderous fantasy, Mr. Waite declares, “Now I submit that at this time of your life you are growing to hate me” (14). Natalie denies it, but Mr. Waite continues, pompously psychoanalyzing Natalie and, by extension, all young women: “Natalie, you must remember that it is natural, that hatred of me does not imply that you as a person hate me as a person, but only that the child, growing normally, passes through a stage when hatred of the parents is inevitable” (14, emphasis in original). As he speaks, the distorted soundscape returns: “If it’s happening [the stage in which she hates him] why does he tell me? Natalie thought briefly, and heard from far away the police detective demanding, ‘Are you prepared to confess that you killed him?’” (15). Internal/external, imaginary/real, dreamed/experienced—as in the breakfast scene, these dyads won’t stay neatly separated. Natalie lives, instead, in the unruly interstices.

This becomes increasingly, and harrowingly, evident as part one hurtles toward its violent conclusion, wherein Natalie is raped by her father’s friend. In this part of the novel, the detective story merges with, and becomes indistinguishable from, what’s happening at the cocktail party. As Natalie looks upon the guests seated on the Waites’ lawn, the detective appears: “‘Let us go over the sequence of events once more,’ the detective said tiredly. He had leaned back and unbuttoned his jacket, and Natalie, who saw him more clearly than she saw the people on the lawn, thought that no matter how tired he was, he would not stop until he had from her what he wanted” (37). This line foreshadows Natalie’s experience with the unnamed guest who aggressively pursues her, who will “not stop” until he violates her. This guest is introduced almost unobtrusively into the narrative when Natalie trips over his feet while serving hors d’oeuvres. But as soon as they interact in a meaningful way, the man and the detective become interchangeable.

 When Natalie nearly trips over the man a second time, he says, “‘Bound we’re going to kill each other today’” (38). With this line of ominous dialogue, the thin veil that has kept the detective story somewhat at bay now becomes transparent, permeable: “Natalie spared a thought for the odd recognition of the fact that his voice came clearly to her through the noise; in spite of the loudness of the party, which she could still hear, she knew exactly what the man was saying as though they had been alone, or, perhaps, as though his voice were in her mind like the detective’s” (38). The man asks her to sit down, and immediately the detective asks her another question, “his voice [coming] to her as clearly as that of the man in the chair” (38). What ensues is a period where the detective speaks lines that, however hackneyed, signal the danger Natalie is in. When Natalie tells the detective she needs time to think, he responds, “‘Think? Suppose you think about the fact that you are very close to being in serious trouble?’” (38). Right before Natalie says something to the guest that he interprets as flirtatious—she tells him she’s thinking “about how wonderful” she is (40)—the detective says, “‘Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position?’” (40). And as the guest leads Natalie into the copse of trees where he will assault her, the detective says, “‘And the blood? . . . What about the blood, Miss Waite?’ How do you account for the blood? […] You will not escape this. […] This you will not escape’” (41, emphases in original). All these lines read doubly, referring both to the imaginary crime Natalie has committed in her detective narrative and the very real crime—rape, physical violence (her face is “bruised” the next morning [44])—that are about to be perpetrated against her. It is as though Natalie intuits what is going to happen and begins, before the fact, to narrativize it.

 After the detective utters his ominous final line—“This you will not escape”—he seemingly disappears from the novel. But not quite, since in his place, the man continues to speak in a similar vein. The two figures have figuratively merged, become one and the same. Wanting to know why Natalie thinks she’s “wonderful,” he begins an interrogation of sorts: “‘Tell me,’ he said insistently. ‘I can’t answer that,’ Natalie said. ‘Do you realize . . . that you made a perfectly outrageous statement? You can’t refuse an explanation’” (42). Both the diction and syntax of his questioning, as well as Natalie’s responses, recall the crime drama dialogue from earlier. The wrenching apart of the imaginary/real dyad here creates a curious sensation in the reader. One can’t help but feel that if Natalie could only abandon the crime story she is at once scripting and living—or if she could somehow change her genre—she could escape. Moreover, and even more curiously, the reader might consider their own complicity. For if Natalie lives in the space between imaginary/real, what of the (imaginary) tale we are holding in our (real) hands? What if we closed the book and set it aside? Could we save Natalie from her fate?

The crime story in part one of Hangsaman uses many familiar conventions in its plotting (crime of passion, investigation, interrogation), characterization (world-weary detective), and diction (noir-speak). But at the same time, Jackson plays with the template. This is perhaps most evident in her collapsing of the detective, father, and guest characters, all of whom, both individually and together, represent patriarchal authority. [4] All three figures are dictatorial, intimidating, and, at points, cruel. Whereas hardboiled novels like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly (1952), and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) aggrandize and even occasionally romanticize their male characters’ sadistic behaviors, Jackson offers a pointed critique of male power. She not only characterizes the father/detective/guest as egocentric and vicious but also suggests that his power is achieved through violence—emotional, physical, sexual—against women.

Frequently praised for its “explosive mixture of violence and eroticism” (“Postman”), the canon of midcentury hardboiled fiction is rife with male aggressors. Indeed, aggression marks  all of the most common male archetypes from the period, whether it is the emasculated male victim (typically the pawn of a femme fatale), the private eye or police officer, or the criminal.[5] While the source of their violence might vary—insecurity, war-related trauma, psychopathy—these male characters’ narrative arcs are defined by their relationship to brutality. Often, though not always, this aggression gets directed toward women, and while the violence occasionally happens off stage, it is more often described in titillating scenes that imply that women invite and enjoy their own brutalization.

Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me offers perhaps the most overt—and deplorable—example. When Sheriff Lou Ford meets Joyce Lakeland early in the novel, he is disarmed by her confidence, which makes him feel like a “chump”: “Here was a little lady who got what she wanted, and to hell with the price tag” (9). He responds to his own insecurity by beating and sexually assaulting Joyce—who isn’t “much over five feet and a hundred pounds” (8)—in a dissociative frenzy. When he comes to and sees what he has done, he regrets his actions, only to discover that Joyce welcomed them:

I got down on my knees by the bed, and begged and apologized. At last her eyelids fluttered and opened. “D-don’t,” she whispered.

“I won’t,” I said. “Honest to God, ma’am, I won’t ever—”

“Don’t talk.”

She brushed her lips against mine.

“Don’t say you’re sorry.”

She kissed me again. She began fumbling at my tie, my shirt; starting to undress me after I’d almost skinned her alive. (12-13)

While this example is particularly egregious, it is not an exception. Indeed, Brian Matzke, describing a sex scene between Frank Chambers and his married lover Cora in Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, notes a pattern in hardboiled crime fiction:

The emotional distance created by the hardboiled narration combined with the physical immediacy of the encounter lead to an objectification of Cora’s body in which Cain has Cora willingly participate: ordering Frank to rip off her clothes she twice tells him, “rip me.” Cora’s wantonness provides the justification for both the hardboiled affect and the violence of the sexual encounter itself, as the violence serves to simultaneously sate Cora’s desire and punish her for it within the sadomasochistic logic of the novel. (114)

The source of Lou and Frank’s brutality differs. Thompson implies that Lou’s violent behavior stems from a psychological condition (Dorothy Clark calls him “irremediably wounded” [50]), whereas Frank seems to be redirecting class rage. By contrast, Mike Hammer, arguably the most sadistic law figure from the canon, frequently acts out of a perverse sense of patriotism: he is on “a personal crusade to save America from the scourge of Communists and degenerates” (Farber 46). Regardless of motive, however, the fact remains that violent acts against women pervade male-authored hardboiled fiction, with the works suggesting that women both are responsible for and take pleasure in their victimization.

Many female crime writers from the era explicitly worked to expose and dismantle this sort of logic in their own (often proto-feminist) fiction. Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place (1947), for example, is a brilliant meta-takedown of hypermasculine crime novels, as it’s narrated by a serial killer who by night stalks vulnerable women and by day passes as a crime writer modelling his work after Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, “‘with a touch of [Ellery] Queen and [John Dickson] Carr’” (Hughes 45). Other writers, including Vera Caspary (Laura, 1943) and Helen Eustis (The Horizontal Man, 1946), instead choose to privilege the perspectives of women—Laura Hunt, a successful businesswoman, and Molly Morrison, a first-year college student, respectively—who have experienced psychological and physical violence. Laura features a police detective but prioritizes the titular Laura’s experiences, while The Horizontal Man dispenses with the detective figure altogether; instead, Molly’s classmate Kate works, with her journalist boyfriend, to solve the crime of which Molly gets falsely accused. Moreover, crime novels like The Horizontal Man andMargaret Millar’s Beast in View (1955) explore trauma-induced dissociative identity disorder—then commonly called split personality disorder—a condition that several critics believe explains Tony’s appearance in Hangsaman.[6]

Jackson’s novel combines many of these approaches—meta-commentary on crime fiction, a focus on women and, in particular, their often-troubled interior states—to create an entirely original sort of crime novel. For one, the crime doesn’t occur until the end of the novel’s first section. It is never investigated and never prosecuted, although Natalie suspects that her parents know what happened (44). Instead, the detective character—who had been investigating an imaginary crime that never happened—vanishes from the narrative as soon as the actual crime takes place. Ultimately, I suggest, Hangsaman, which blends and bends ingredients of both hardboiled and proto-feminist midcentury crime fiction,is less a novel of investigation and more a novel of survivorship. Even more specifically, it is a novel about surviving a trauma within a culture that persistently ignores, minimizes, and even sanctions violence against women. This is certainly how many of Jackson’s original readers understood Hangsaman. In a letter to her parents dated June 22, 1951, Jackson describes her fan mail for Hangsaman, stating she has received “several letters from college girls, saying that the same thing has happened to them. i have to answer them all, of course, and i have no idea what to say to the college girls” (Letters 199). While Jackson concludes this thought somewhat disappointingly—she supposes she will tell the letter writers that “they’ll probably outgrow it” (Letters 199)—this is, in my view, less a personal failing on Jackson’s part and more an indictment of the era in which she lived, one that lacked both the language and concrete mechanisms to support survivors of assault.

But where we might want more from Jackson’s letter, it is difficult to imagine Hangsaman handling Natalie’s assault and its immediate aftermath more thoughtfully. Taking a cue from Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, Jackson refuses to describe the assault on the page. Hughes places all of serial killer Dixon (Dix) Steele’s violent acts—the rape and murder of women—in the blank spaces of the novel, typically between two chapters. The Hollywood film based on Hughes’ novel, directed by Nicholas Ray and released in 1950 to much acclaim, similarly avoids scenes of violence, but this has more to do with preserving ambiguity about whether or not Dix is culpable. (He’s not. Dix, played by a brooding Humphrey Bogart, isn’t a killer at all in the film but rather a misunderstood Hollywood writer, a change that evacuates Hughes’ novel of its feminist messaging.) Ray, however, has no problem showing, in disturbing medium closeup, graphic crime scene photographs of a victim. Jackson, by contrast, follows Hughes’ approach, positioning Natalie’s assault in an ellipses. One moment we are hearing Natalie’s internal thoughts—“Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me?” (43)—and the next it is the following morning. One line of blank space, a haunting page break, separates these two temporal frames.

This, however, doesn’t mean that Jackson underestimates what happened. The remaining pages of part one, set the day after the party, are devoted to Natalie’s immediate, and agonizing, response to the assault. Notably, Natalie’s imaginative story-making comes to an abrupt halt after the page break. Instead, she uses language as a sort of defensive shield, attempting to erase what happened by creating what we might think of as the paradoxical absence of story. It is worth reproducing one longer passage in full, to see both how language—and particularly repetition—functions and how markedly different this non-story is from Natalie’s earlier narrativizing:

 “I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.”

Slowly she knew she was sick; her head ached, she was dizzy, she loathed her hands as they came toward her face to cover her eyes. “Nothing happened,” she chanted, “nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened,” she said, looking at the window, at the dear lost day. “I don’t remember.” (43)

Natalie rotely recites a handful of words to displace the details of the assault, defuse them of their charge and thereby create an alternate non-story, a gap. These same three phrases—I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter, and nothing happened—appear multiple times on the following pages until, toward the very end of part one, Natalie hits upon a new thought: “I wish I were dead” (46). It won’t be until much later—the final ten pages of the novel, when Natalie and Tony are on their trip off campus—that Natalie will find the language to confront this experience and re-narrativize it.

Tony plays a pivotal role in Natalie’s breakthrough. At this point in the novel, the two have developed a close relationship with overt sexual leanings. In the scene that precedes their trip into town, Tony reads an erotic novel out loud to Natalie (180). Then the two sleep “side by side” (180) in Natalie’s bed before slipping, in the early morning hours, into the dormitory bathrooms to “[bathe] together, washing one another’s back and trying to splash without sound” (181). They take delight in “the feeling of being together without fear” (181). After this, they head into town, the final set piece of the novel. This episode, as noted earlier, is initially full of adventure, mischief, and collaborative story-making. But after an encounter with a man in the cafeteria, the tone shifts, and when they step outside, “it was for the first time as though they were going somewhere, toward a place now, where before they had only wandered happily” (198). Tony seems distant, and Natalie tries to think of something to say that will “bring back their former peaceful state” (197-8). Finally, Tony, in a voice “somehow fierce and angry,” explains why she is upset: “‘You see . . . it frightens me when people try to grab at us like that’” (198). While Tony seems to mean this metaphorically—the man in the cafeteria hadn’t physically touched them, and she goes on to explain that she doesn’t like it when people “watch” her and ask her questions (199)—this line nevertheless conjures Natalie’s assault from part one. Tony then puts forward a proposal: “‘I know a place where we can go and no one can trouble us’” (199). This place, arrived at by bus and then a walk, is a copse of trees that eerily recalls the site of Natalie’s assault.

This is arguably the most enigmatic episode of the book, one where readers must peer “thru a glass darkly” and participate, alongside Natalie and Jackson herself, in the making of the meaning (Derleth B6). Recalling an early reviewer’s assertion that “we need to know where we are with the facts,” the facts are as follows: Tony and Natalie board a bus that drops them at an abandoned amusement park on the edge of town (Nolan 239). Tony leads Natalie into the trees. They have a conversation charged with dread, and Tony disappears. Natalie walks out of the trees and hitches a ride back to campus. But here I’m only describing one side of the binaries discussed earlier—real, experienced, external—when in fact the narrative is taking place in the interstices, somewhere between real/imaginary, experienced/imagined, and external/internal. Natalie’s trauma from part one is both restaged and re-narrativized within this peculiar interspace. That is, she creates a new story that weaves together elements of the original trauma and elements of her current experience with Tony. This process is, I argue, healing, the essential step that lays the foundation for the final pages of the book, where Natalie has reclaimed her story and her self.

But when Natalie first arrives at the edge of the wooded area, she is vulnerable and deeply afraid. It is as if the trees, the synecdoche of Natalie’s assault, have been waiting for her return: “Over their heads the trees leaned toward one another, nodding and perhaps whispering ahead that they had come, after so long a delay” (208). Natalie asks Tony, “Are you going in here? Into the trees?” (209), and when Tony gives a cryptic response, Natalie follows her down the path:

“Tony?” Natalie said again more urgently, realizing suddenly, concretely and acutely, that is was indeed very dark and that ahead of her the figure she had mistaken for Tony was only another tree.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Tony, a voice dying away, now gone out of hearing; was it that way? Twigs over her mouth?

“Tony,” Natalie said, suddenly very frightened. (210)

To manage her fear, Natalie invents a new story, one that borrows its plot from both crime and horror fiction. In this story, Tony never had genuine feelings for Natalie. All this time, Tony has been following an order from a malevolent third party—“Get her here”—who will inflict harm upon Natalie (213). Natalie wonders, “Is she sorry? Does she regret it even for a minute, does a sudden fleeing picture come to her, of the two of us together when it was just the beginning?” (213). Then Natalie realizes that she likely isn’t the first victim of Tony and Tony’s accomplice. She asks Tony if she’s been to this place before, “wanting to say, Have there been others? Are you experienced? Am I the first? What did they say? Do? Were they afraid? Did it happen here? Why does it happen at all? Who put you up to it? May I please go home?” (213). Tony interrupts Natalie’s train of thought, saying, “‘Of course I’ve been here before. . . . How did you think I knew how to come?’” (213). The atmosphere of menace is palpable, as Tony hints toward the dark ritual about to occur: “‘Wait a while . . . I’m almost ready. . . . It won’t take long. What are you afraid of?’’ (213). When Natalie confesses that she thought they were just playing a game, Tony responds, “‘Keep thinking of it as a game’” and comes toward her, “Tony’s hands on her face, on her back, holding her” (214). “She wants me,” Natalie thinks, “rip[ping] herself away” and declaring “I will not,” before finally escaping and being picked up by passersby (214).[7]

This new story that Natalie fabricates—one of sexual threat, escape, and survivorship—doesn’t emerge out of nowhere. First and foremost, it’s an obvious repetition, and transmutation, of her assault at the garden party. Kaslik states that “Natalie’s final journey to the wooded area near a closed amusement park with Tony is a deeply introverted, symbolic parallel to the site where her physical and sexual assault took place and functions as a simultaneous death and rebirth” (181). But Natalie also stitches into this new story other narratives she has been consuming. The imagined plot about Tony grooming victims for a third party bears strong resemblance to the pornographic—and sadomasochistic—novel Tony reads out loud earlier, The Way of a Man with a Maid. First published at the turn into the twentieth century, this anonymous novel, from which Jackson reproduces several lines, features a serial rapist named Jack who, with the assistance of a girl named Alice, lures his victims into a chamber explicitly designed for that purpose. In the story Natalie invents, Tony occupies the role of the Alice figure, the “decoy and assistant” (Way 70), who, it should be noted, is Jack’s first victim. Significantly, another Alice—Lewis Carroll’s—gets referenced during their trip in town, when Natalie recites lines from the closing poem of Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Often reprinted as “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the dark coming-of-age poem, much like Hangsaman, is set in another type of interstices, most overtly between childhood/adulthood but also between dreaming/awake and not there/there. (The lines Natalie recites are “Still she haunts me phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes” (Hangsaman 190).) Natalie, in short, is drawing upon narrative to make narrative.

In her new story, one that simultaneously weaves in and writes over her original assault, she has agency and control. In the final line of the novel, Natalie feels “grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (218). Critics have found this ending troubling. Kristopher Woofter, for example, calls it “almost impossibly happy” (9), ambiguous and out of step with the preceding narrative. Kaslik makes a similar claim: “Given the sardonic, complex tone and unstable point of view established throughout Jackson’s off-kilter bildungsroman, as well as the overwhelming despair expressed in Natalie’s highly interiorized sense of reality, the ending rings completely false—a forced convention of the fairy-tale coming-of-age narrative” (182). While Natalie’s turnabout is indeed swift—especially since she appears to contemplate suicide immediately before this—I would argue that the final lines are complex. On the one hand, Natalie has, by exorcising Tony, grappled with her earlier trauma and reshaped it into a new narrative. But on the other hand, the lines read almost like a protective mantra, not unlike Natalie’s rote recitations in the aftermath of the assault. Here I find Woofter’s interpretation of the ending of We Have Always Lived in the Castle both illuminating and relevant. Merricat’s “we are so happy,” according to Woofter, “seems as much a tyrannical adjuration as a heart- felt confirmation” (10), a claim we might apply to the closing lines of Hangsaman.

According to trauma theorist Cathy Caruth, one feature “seems oddly to inhabit all traumatic experience: the inability fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event fully only at the cost of witnessing oneself. Central to the very immediacy of this experience, that is, is a gap…” (7). A traumatic event can retain its unyielding hold because it has not been symbolized and incorporated into the narrative of the subject’s life. As Mieke Bal explains, traumatic recall is “inflexible and invariable,” as the initial events “remain present for the subject with particular vividness and/or totally resist integration. […T]hey cannot become narratives, either because the traumatizing events are mechanically reenacted as drama rather than synthetically narrated by the memorizing agent who ‘masters’ them, or because they remain ‘outside’ the subject” (x, viii). Narrativizing trauma, then—finding a means of giving language to that which resists narrative—surfaces as a distinct strategy for anchoring oneself in the gap of trauma. This action should not be equated with forgetting; indeed, the narrativizing of trauma exists as a tool one can employ in order to hold onto the memory in psychically healthy manner.

Jackson’s Hangsaman explores, and even enacts, both the experience of trauma and the means of surviving it. She places Natalie’s assault in an ellipses or “gap.” Natalie’s immediate response—her repeated mantra of words that reject what happened—demonstrates how the traumatic event “resist[s] integration” (Bal viii). And her later re-narrativizing of the event allows her to “master” it. At every stage, Jackson is also drawing from and reworking genre conventions, particularly with respect to the crime novel. In a discussion of how and why Jackson uses supernatural and detective fiction tropes in The Haunting of Hill House, Melanie Anderson states that “Jackson manipulates the trappings of these narrative forms to subvert their patriarchal underpinnings and open a space for the investigation of the very real terrors of 1950s American culture for women” (“Perception” 36). Jackson, I argue, is doing something very similar in Hangsaman. The typical hardboiled novel from the era underwrites, whether overtly or covertly, violence against women. Rarely do we see a victim survive such violence much less work to “master” it. Instead, the novels focus on the perpetrators of violence or the male detectives who investigate them. Hangsaman shifts the lens. Women’s experiences, including “very real terrors” like the crime of sexual assault, are centered. And patriarchy, the culprit, is investigated, put on trial, and finally found guilty.

Works Cited

Anderson, Melanie R. “Introduction.” Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, edited by Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 1-6.

—. “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House.” Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 35-53.

Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crew, and Leo Spitzer, UP of New England, 1999, pp. vii-xvii.

Carpenter, Lynette. “Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, and Real Life: Shirley Jackson, a Woman Writer.” Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 143-148.

Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, pp. 3-12.

Clark, Dorothy G. “Being’s Wound: (Un)Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 42, issue 1, 2009, pp. 49-66.

Damon, Gene. “Lesbiana.” The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, vol. 15, no. 11 & 12, Aug.-Sept. 1971, pp. 45-50. https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1003347915

Derleth, August. “Novel Lacks Stature of ‘The Lottery.’” Chicago Daily Tribune,29 Apr. 1951, p. B6.

Dobson, James E. “Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson and the Campus Novel.” Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 112-127.

Farber, Stephen. “Violence and the Bitch Goddess.” Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1999, pp. 45-56.

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, W.W. Norton & Co,, 2016.

Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 73-96.

Hattenhaur, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, SUNY P, 2003.

Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place, New York Review Books, 2017.

Jackson, Shirley. Hangsaman, Penguin, 2013.

—. “To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson.” 22 June 1951. The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman, Random House, 2021, pp. 197-201.

Kaslik, Ibi. “Hangsaman: Writing the Self in Blood at the Margins.” Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristofer Woofter. Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 171-183.

Matzke, Brian. “Hardboiled Feminism: Vera Caspary’s Laura as a Revision of the Detective Genre.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 50, no 1., 2017, pp. 109-125.

Miller, Nolan. “Mr. Jones and Others.” Antioch Review, vol. 11, no 2, Summer 1951, pp. 237-241.

Murphy, Bernice. “Do You Know Who I Am?”: Contextualising Shirley Jackson. 2003. University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ph.D. dissertation.

Ooms, Julie. “‘What Obligation Do I Have Toward Her?’: College Girl Friendships and Self-Actualization in Hangsaman and The Bell Jar.” Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture, edited by K. Branham and K. L. Reames, Springer, 2023, pp. 149-172.

“The Postman Always Rings Twice (Special Edition),” Product Page, Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/22812/the-postman-always-rings-twice-special-edition-by-james-m-cain/

Rizzuto, Anthony Dean. Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, Springer, 2021.

Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, 1991.

Rev. of Hangsaman, Publishers’ Weekly, 13 Oct. 1969, p. 56.

The Way of a Main with a Man, e-book edition, June 2010, www.erotica-ebook.com.

Woofter, Kristofer. “Introduction.” Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristofer Woofter. Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 1-18.

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NOTES

[1] Reviews also express anxiety around a heterosexual/homosexual binary. Hangsaman gets a mention in Jeannette H. Fosters’ 1959 “minor classic of lesbian critical theory” (Franklin 439), Sex Variant Women in Literature, and was embraced as a “Lesbian classic” as early as the 1970s (Damon47). But Natalie and Tony’s ambiguous friendship made other readers uncomfortable. A 1969 review of the paperback reprint, for example, calls it “bizarre,” and “not explicitly Lesbian but certainly implicitly so” (56).

[2] While this ambiguity agitated early reviewers, more recent critics, myself included, read these moments of destabilization as indicators of Jackson’s bold experimental style. See James Dobson’s “Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson and the Campus Novel.” See also Hattenhauer, who describes Jackson’s fiction as “proto-postmodernist.”

[3] Dobson and Ibi Kaslik, who discuss Natalie’s interest in the genre, are exceptions. While not on Hangsaman, see also Melanie Anderson’s fascinating “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House.”

[4] We might also expand this triumvirate to include Natalie’s professor, Arthur Langdon. He bears many similarities to Natalie’s father—in their profession, their treatment of Natalie, and even in their names (Arthur/Arnold)—and Natalie explicitly compares Arthur and his wife Elizabeth to her parents. Arthur’s emotional abuse of Elizabeth—he cheats on her, isolates her, is dismissive of her feelings—echoes Arnold’s treatment of his wife.

[5] For example, see, respectively, Walter Huff in Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943), Spillane’s aptly-named Mike Hammer (multiple novels) or Thompson’s Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, and Frank Chambers in Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. For a recent book-length discussion of masculinity and violence against women in hardboiled fiction—particularly in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels—see Rizzuto.

[6] Hattenhauer describes Natalie’s “schizoid personality” (113). Both Angela Hague and Ibi Kaslik read Hangsaman as a novel about mental illness, and Kaslik and Julie Ooms compare it to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963).

[7] The couple in the car that stops for Natalie bears a resemblance to Natalie’s parents, and Natalie explicitly views them that way. (“It is my mother,” Natalie thinks when she looks at the woman in the car [215].) This, too, is a form of repetition and transmutation. Natalie’s own parents fail to protect their daughter or acknowledge her assault, while these surrogate parents not only recognize the potential threat of “‘attackers and all that’”—”‘I guess your Mom would be pretty mad if she saw you walking down that lonely road alone’”—but also rescue her (215).