Into the Woods: the Night-Journeys of Hangsaman & “Young Goodman Brown”
by Robert Zipser
Author Bio: Robert Zipser is an independent scholar and attorney. His most recent completed work is the book chapter entitled "Meeting the Devil: Diabolic Influence and Diabolic Resistance in Shirley Jackson's James Harris Stories" contributed to the collection Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction, edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd, set to be published later this year. He delivered a paper on Jackson's story "The Witch" as a member of the Shirley Jackson Society Panel at the 2022 American Literature Association Conference. He has also published an article entitled "The Dangerous Classes: Victorian Moral Rhetoric in Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd'" in the Spring 2020 issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review.
At the climax of Shirley Jackson’s second novel Hangsaman (1951), Jackson’s young protagonist Natalie Waite is reluctantly led into a wilderness setting by her strange diabolic friend Tony. In the forest, Natalie experiences disorientation, isolation, terror and temptation. However, she successfully passes through this trial, rejects the destructive seduction of Tony, and emerges from the wilderness as a newly secure integrated human being who can rejoin her community with confident self-assurance. Not all scholars view Natalie’s experience as a true transformation. Darryl Hattenhauer[1], Shelly Ingram[2], and Wyatt Bonikowski[3], for example, contend that Natalie has not actually been transformed in this climactic scene and that her alleged security is respectively self-deluding, temporary, or ambiguous. I argue that Natalie does in fact undergo a true transformation in the woods, but that to understand why Natalie’s experience is transformative it is necessary to recognize Jackson’s employment of elements from New England Puritan history in her description of Natalie’s ordeal. Natalie’s experience aligns with the spiritual and psychological stages of the Puritan conversion experience, which was both a spiritual passage from sin to grace and a psychological passage from anxiety to assurance.
I further argue that, as she has done elsewhere, Jackson draws on elements from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown” in her portrayal of Natalie’s experience. Natalie’s journey into the woods and confrontation with Tony evokes Brown’s journey into the woods to meet the Devil. Both Natalie and Brown experience the isolation, confusion, terror, and temptation that were elements of the conversion experience. But whereas Brown fails to complete the experience and emerges from the forest a frightened, distrustful, and despairing man, Natalie defeats Tony (and the subconscious antagonistic force Tony also represents) and walks out of the woods “grown up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.” Through her allusions to the Hawthorne story, Jackson suggests an implicit contrast between the two experiences which emphasizes the authenticity of Natalie’s transformation.
Jackson’s great interest in Puritan history is well known. Her interest in the era began in her early college years, when she first read Cotton Mather and Joseph Glanvill,[4] but continued throughout her career, as evidenced by her 1956 non-fiction history of the Salem Witchcraft Trials for children, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Jackson’s absorption in the period greatly influenced her fiction. Although Jackson’s use of the conversion experience has not, to my knowledge, been previously analyzed, scholars such as Lynette Carpenter (who demonstrates the relationship between the gender dynamics of the witchcraft persecutions and the persecutions of Constance and Merricat Blackwood), Bernice M. Murphy, and Faye Ringel have all noted Jackson’s use of psycho-historical themes from Puritan history in her novels and stories. Ringel notes: “She [Jackson] portrayed the witchcraft persecution, shunning, and resistance to change in modern suburban Gothic settings” (Ringel 44). Murphy asserts that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson found that the history and theology of Puritan Massachusetts resonated with the themes and symbols she sought to portray in her own work, discovering “inspiration in the dark possibilities presented by New England’s bloody past and suggestive landscape” (Murphy 105). Hangsaman provides another example of Jackson’s transposing of a Puritan theme into a twentieth-century plot.
Jackson was very familiar with Hawthorne’s work, and there are both explicit and implicit references to Hawthorne in her novels and stories. In Jackson’s story “The Tooth”, when the protagonist, Clara Spencer, comes out of the ether at the dentist’s office she quotes a line from Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Darryl Hattenhauer has pointed out that Tony’s silent footfalls in the forest in Hangsaman allude to Pearl’s supernatural walking in The Scarlet Letter (1850). More specifically, there are multiple examples of Jackson drawing on “Young Goodman Brown.” John G. Parks compares the fire at the Blackwood mansion in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) to the witches’ Sabbath flames in Hawthorne’s story.[5] Ioana Baciu has noted that the self-righteous Miss Strangeworth (whose name I believe alludes to Hawthorne’s cold-hearted Roger Chillingworth) in Jackson’s posthumously published story “The Possibility of Evil” (1969) exhibits a blindness to her own sin which recalls the title character of “Young Goodman Brown.”[6] Moreover, in Jackson’s story “The Daemon Lover,” the unnamed protagonist’s discovery of a paper ribbon on the ground toward the end of the story echoes Brown’s interpretation of the pink ribbon discussed below.
From both Hawthorne’s work and Puritan writings, Jackson would have been familiar with the crucial theological and psycho-historical Puritan symbol of the wilderness as both a literal and spiritual landscape where sinners must enter to be tested and afflicted by the Lord, and tempted by evil, before they might receive God’s grace. For the Puritans, the events of the Old Testament were seen as prefiguring not only the events of the New Testament but also the Puritans’ own place in redemptive history. The flight of the Israelites out of Egypt into the desert wilderness prefigured the colonists’ own journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the new wilderness of America. Just as the Israelites were forced to sojourn in the desert for forty years and endure harsh conditions and tribulations visited upon them by God before they could enter Canaan, the early Puritans believed that they too must endure frightening trials and afflictions in this new country before they could enter the Promised Land. As Puritan minister Thomas Hooker wrote in his (circa) 1640 sermon “The Application of Redemption” regarding the journey to Massachusetts:
This was typified in the passage of the children of Israel towards the promised land; they must come into and go through a vast and roaring wilderness, where they must be bruised with many pressures, humbled under many overbearing difficulties they were to meet withal before they could possess that good land which abounded with all prosperity, flowed with milk and honey. (Hooke 177-78)
The new land of Massachusetts served as both a literal wilderness, filled with actual terrors of dark forests, wild beasts, bitter cold, and strange Native American tribes, and a spiritual wilderness filled with evil temptations, tortuous self-doubt, anguish over sin, and fear of the Lord’s wrath. This was “the Devil’s territory,” typified by the wilderness temptation of Jesus (Mat. 4:1-11), in which Satan tempts Christ with promises of worldly power. The Puritans believed that the Devil’s temptation formed part of God’s overall test for them. It was in the “wilderness,” whether in its literal or spiritual state, that sinners must confront terrors, face the sin in their souls, resist temptation, and humble themselves to God, and hope toreceive the gift of God’s irresistible grace and experience conversion. They would then be “born again” as God’s elect and would have assurance of salvation.
Because this experience was so fundamental to the Puritan religious community, there are numerous conversion narratives in Puritan writings. Of course, the specific details differed but there were certain common stages: typically, the supplicants would first feel lost, terrified, and confused. They would admit and face the darkness and sin in their own souls. They would emotionally let go all worldly attachments and fully humble themselves to God, relying on faith. They would then experience a new feeling of spiritual and psychic wholeness and integration and joyful security. As for Natalie in the forest, salvation did not come without terror.
The “wilderness” served as a spiritual metaphor for the Puritans for a state of loss of faith, doubt, fear and despair; it could be experienced anywhere as an internal struggle. In his book Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind, David R. Williams describes the conversion experience of Puritan minister Michael Wigglesworth: “Michael Wigglesworth, 1630-1705, revealed in his diary a soul tormented by a fear of damnation so overwhelming that it was rarely, if ever, alleviated by a glimpse of grace,” causing Wigglesworth to experience a “Torment of emptiness” and a “feeling of bottomless terror that spread out like a wilderness from the ‘deep Abyss’ of his heart” (Williams 78). Jonathan Edwards summarized his conversion experience, which led from terror to serenity, this way: “My soul hath been compassed with the terrors of death, the sorrows of hell were upon me, and a wilderness of woe was in me; but blessed, blessed, blessed, be the Lord my God” (Williams 108).
As the wilderness was not always literal, conversion did not always take place in the forest. Narratives that did take place in the frontier were especially powerful—perhaps the most famous being Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682)—because they evoked biblical imagery. But conversion could take place anywhere. David Brainerd’s conversion took place while he was out for a walk. He recounts that he “was walking again in the same solitary place, where I was brought to see my self lost and helpless…I was attempting to pray,” but he then received God’s grace and felt himself “in a new world, and every thing about me appeared with a different aspect…the way of salvation opened to me” (Brauer 231-32, emphasis in the original).
This experience was not only spiritual but also psychological. In his discussion of Jonathan Edwards’ descriptions of the conversion experience, Williams notes the striking parallel between this descent into the darkness of the soul and the descent into the darkness of the subconscious undertaken in Freudian psychoanalysis:
The experience that Edwards urged on his congregation, was what would today be called a psychological crisis…the destruction of the self, the ego, in the chaos of the subconscious mind…conversion could not take place until the old ego was yielded to that terror; before this occurred, there could be no re-integration, no discovery of wholeness, no psychic health. (Williams 96)
One can describe this psychological aspect of conversion in alignment with the stages of Natalie Waite’s experience: (1) isolation, doubt, and terror; (2) a descent into the unconscious to confront and defeat repressed dark impulses and fears; (3) abandonment of the old self; and (4) a reintegration of a new self that is liberated from those fears and self-destructive impulses. Jerald C. Brauer notes that this process resulted in a profound feeling of new security and confidence: “As a consequence of the conversion, the believer feels like a new being, a new person without contradictions, insecurities, terrors, and tensions” (Brauer 243).
It may be remarked that these stages of the Puritan conversion experience are similar to the classic anthropological structure of the rite de passage identified by Victor Turner (following the work of Arnold van Gennep). Turner claimed that all ritualistic rites of passage were marked by three phases: separation, comprising a detachment or isolation from the community; margin or liminal, comprising a transitional and ambiguous state of being “in-between” two worlds or states of being, and reaggregation, comprising a return to the community as a new person.[7] It should not be surprising that scholars have identified the Christian conversion experience, applicable to the Puritans and many other Protestant denominations, as a type of rite of passage. In her essay on Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative, Michelle Burnham describes Rowlandson’s harrowing experience in the wilderness between her separation from her community and her reaggregation into it as a converted soul, as consistent with “Victor Turner’s concept of ‘liminality’” (Burnham 65). William M. Clements notes: “When accompanied by formalized behavior, the transition from sinner (a secular state) to Christian (a sacred state) is a classic instance of the rite de passage phenomenon characterized by Arnold van Gennep” (Clements 35).
This rite of conversion was also expected to create a profound change in heart. The true convert who had been selfish and bitter was suddenly filled with a perception of the beauty of God displayed in all creation (Williams 108). For this reason, from a Puritan point of view, the individual who claimed salvation but remained mired in doubt, fear, and distrust of his community had not really been converted. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne presents us with such a false convert. In the story, which is set in Salem, Massachusetts on the eve of the Witchcraft Trials, Brown, a young newlywed third-generation Puritan, bids his pretty, pink-ribboned wife Faith goodbye one evening and sets out for the woods outside Salem village. Brown’s precise intention is ambiguous; the narrator only tells us that he has an “evil purpose” (Hawthorn 134). It becomes clear that Brown has made an appointment to meet the Devil in the wilderness. Since Brown considers himself a regenerate Christian, he evidently believes that he can test himself against the Devil one final time to confirm his conviction that he has indeed received God’s saving grace and is therefore protected against the perils of sin.
As Michael J. Colacurcio explains, it is significant that Brown is a third-generation Puritan. Although the first generation of settlors in Massachusetts were orthodox in their Calvinist faith and saw America as the wilderness where they must experience true conversion to be saved, this piety began to wane in subsequent generations as the colony became more prosperous. Narratives of conversion experience became fewer and church membership declined. In 1662, to address this problem, the synod of churches in the colony adopted the Half-Way Covenant which allowed the grandchildren of true converts (like Brown) to be admitted as partial church members without the necessity of demonstrating a conversion experience.[8] Although he has never had a conversion experience, Brown’s church membership gives him the mistaken assurance that he is nonetheless one of God’s elect who has received God’s grace and is fully justified in confronting the Devil.
The first half of Brown’s journey aligns with stages of the conversion experience. When he enters the forest, he begins to experience the lonely solitude of the wilderness. The trees take on anthropomorphic and vaguely sinister qualities: “He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be” (134). Brown does meet the Devil and begins to walk deeper with him into the forest but is suddenly reluctant: “Friend…having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose to now to return whence I came” (135). The Devil, however, lures Brown deeper into the dark woods: “We are but a little way in the forest, yet” (135).
When the apparition of a woman that Brown believes to be his old teacher Goody Cloyse appears and talks with the Devil, Brown decides to go on by himself. He becomes isolated, disoriented and anxious, imagining that he hears voices carried on the wind and one female voice that he believes he recognizes as his wife’s. He grows terrified, anguished, and grief-stricken in the wilderness which again takes on supernatural qualities:
‘Faith! Faith!’ shouted Goodman Brown in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying out –‘Faith! Faith!’ as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage and terror, was yet piercing the night when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. (141)
At this point, Brown is in the agonized position of the sinner poised on the brink of the conversion experience; he should be humbling himself before God and rejecting sin. However, when Brown sees a pink ribbon fluttering down through the air that he believes belongs to his wife, his reaction is exactly the opposite of the convert. The ribbon is likely a “spectral” illusion created by the Devil. Hawthorne uses it to reveal that Brown is not regenerate. A true convert would resist the Devil’s illusions and would know that they are temptations meant to drive him to despair. But Brown immediately and cynically abandons all faith and maniacally embraces sin: “‘My Faith is gone!’ cried he, after one stupefied moment. ‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given’” (141).[9] Instead of confronting the darkness in his own soul, Brown surrenders to it.
Brown eventually comes to a clearing which is supernaturally lit by blazing pine trees. There, in the fiery glow, Brown thinks that he sees the people of his town, including the deacon and minister, mingling with criminals and sinners (143-44). The Devil appears and Brown, who is now joined, he imagines, by his reluctant wife Faith, is brought forward to be baptized into sin. The Devil tempts them by offering them godlike powers: “Far more than this! It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin” (145). There are echoes here of Satan’s offer to Jesus of “all the kingdoms of the world in their splendor” (Mat. 4:8). At the last moment, Brown calls on his wife to resist the Devil. The Devil and the scene immediately vanish and Brown wakes up alone in the forest (146).
Hawthorne leaves ambiguous whether Brown actually met the Devil or merely dreamed it because the important point is the effect of the experience. Brown’s rejection of the Devil proves to be illusory, whether interpreted as a literal or psychological event. Brown is not regenerated and reintegrated by his confrontation with evil but is in fact fractured and disintegrated by his experience. He emerges from the wilderness more anxious and frightened than when he entered it. Instead of seeing God’s beauty reflected in his wife and neighbors, Brown becomes a miserable and distrustful man whose “dying hour was gloom” (148). Ironically, Brown’s experience has disproved his presumed elect status. Brown is not converted; rather, he remains mired in the darkness of his own sin and misery: “Instead of regeneration,” Williams explains, “his journey into the wilderness produced an endless wandering in the psychological wilderness of despair” (Williams 184). Brown’s state of despair—itself considered by the Puritans to be the work of the Devil—proves that he has been defeated in the forest. Brown’s defeat contrasts sharply with the victorious wilderness experience that Jackson will create for Natalie Waite.
Shirley Jackson’s use of the Puritan conversion experience in her 1951 novel has an added layer of complexity due to the period in which she wrote the book. While Hawthorne, writing in 1835, could, like the Puritans, intuit certain psychological processes, Jackson wrote Hangsaman at a time when Freudian psychoanalysis was at its height. Jackson herself underwent psychiatric treatment, and her knowledge of Freud surely allowed her to better understand Puritan conversion as both a spiritual and psychological journey. Thus, Natalie’s journey into the dark woods, confrontation with evil, and reemergence as a new person would have been imagined by Jackson as being at once a Hawthornean wilderness encounter with the Devil and a Freudian journey into the unconscious to confront the repressed trauma and internalized destructive drives one must overcome to develop a mature autonomous self.
Jackson actually presents us with two events in Natalie Waite’s life in which, like Brown, she is led into the wilderness by a diabolic figure. These events bookend the novel. The first event occurs early in the book when Natalie meets an evil man at her father’s cocktail party. The man leads Natalie away from the party and into the woods. As in “Young Goodman Brown,” the woods, formerly a happy place for Natalie, become darker and more foreboding and the trees take on sinister anthropomorphic traits. Natalie senses the trees’ “terrifying silence, so much more expectant by night, and their great unbent heads, and the darkness they pulled about her with silent patient hands” (223). At this point in her life, Natalie is naïve about the world; she does not have a frame of reference for evil and is not prepared to encounter it. The man sexually assaults her (224). The next morning Natalie, traumatized, consciously wills herself to repress the event and pretend that it never happened so that she can continue to function and fulfill her plan to go off to college. In a sense, by repressing the trauma of the event, Natalie internalizes the man’s destructive intent and turns it upon herself as a subconscious “antagonist.”
Natalie does go to college–her small liberal arts school is modeled after Bennington—and the school is presumably set in New England. At college Natalie experiences difficulties both socially and academically. She is often insecure and uncertain, lacking a strong sense of her own agency. Just as she is intimidated at home by her overbearing father, who still seeks to control her through his correspondence, she is vulnerable to intimidation by her peers and is bullied by two older students, Anne and Vicki, who actually sneak into her room when she is not there to read her letters.
What all the evil antagonists in Natalie’s life, to differing degrees, have in common is that they are all controlling, bullying, and invasive. But Natalie’s justifiable rage over these intimidations remains subconscious; she cannot yet integrate the dark parts of her id with her conscious ego. Natalie’s “violence” remains a fantasy. Like her fantasies early in the novel of having committed a murder, Natalie now has violent fantasies in which she turns people into miniature mannikins that she can herself bully and rip apart (345-46).
n the midst of this emotional turmoil, Natalie meets Tony. Tony’s exact nature is ambiguous. Like the Devil in “Young Goodman Brown,” Tony may physically exist as an evil being or she may be a projection of Natalie’s subconscious destructive impulses. Either way, it is clear that Tony is a diabolic figure who, like the Devil, is linked to the wilderness. At one point, early in Natalie’s friendship with Tony, Tony literally materializes out a tree that disengages itself and walks toward Natalie (321).
Tony’s temptation of Natalie is at first only suggested—they sleep in the same bed and shower together—but ultimately manifests in the climactic scenes of the novel. On a break from school, Tony and Natalie travel into town where they fantasize about escape (360) and eat at a café where they encounter a one-armed man (365). Ultimately, however, Tony must lead Natalie into the wilderness where a conversion experience can take place—a dark forest near a closed down amusement park suggestively named Paradise Park (376). I find Shelley Ingram’s description of the park as a “grotesque Eden” especially apt (62). However, I disagree with Ingram’s contention that the main source material for these scenes is pagan myth surrounding the Goddess Diana. Rather, I would argue that the “grotesque Eden” nature of the park only reinforces Jackson’s Puritan wilderness theme.
This climactic episode begins with parallels to “Young Goodman Brown.” Natalie, like Brown, is at first reluctant to venture into the dark forest. Tony, like the Devil, lures her into it (377). As Natalie follows Tony deeper into the forest, it becomes darker and the trees take on anthropomorphic qualities which both evoke “Young Goodman Brown” and recapitulate the scene of Natalie’s sexual assault: “The trees were waiting in the darkness ahead, quietly expectant…she knew surely that the trees bent over her, trying, perhaps, to touch her hair” (379). As Tony and Natalie move further into the forest, Tony becomes progressively stranger and speaks to Natalie as if from a distance. Like the Devil in “Young Goodman Brown,” Tony promises Natalie godlike power if she completes this journey, tempting her with “a throne higher than the moon, on a black rock, where sitting we can rule the world” (379).
The link between Tony’s promises and those of the Devil is further reinforced by their clear allusion, not often recognized by other Jackson critics, to an earlier Jackson work. Tony promises Natalie a place where there is “moving blue water and hot hot sand under our feet” (378). This promise practically quotes a seductive promise made by the diabolic James Harris to Clara Spencer in Jackson’s story “The Tooth” (1949): “the sand…looks like snow but it’s hot, even at night it’s hot under your feet” (Jackson, Novels and Stories 203). On one level, this connection emphasizes Tony’s nature as another demon lover figure like Harris, whether real or imagined, whose destructive goal is to drive her victim to loss of personal identity, despair, and madness. However, if we continue to apply Puritan theology to this scene, this comparison may be taken further: it can be argued that Tony in fact is James Harris. Puritan Calvinism taught that the Devil could assume any corporeal form.[10] Indeed, in the stories in The Lottery and Other Stories collection, James Harris appears in a variety of guises—young, old, slender, heavy-set. Tony may simply be another form adopted by the Devil to best attract Natalie. This interpretation is further consistent with “Young Goodman Brown” in which the Devil assumes the form of an older man closely resembling Brown.
The Puritan conversion experience required isolation, disorientation, and fear, so it follows that there is a moment when Natalie, like Goodman Brown, finds herself alone, confused, and terrified in the wilderness:
Natalie stopped and stood very still among the trees, feeling dreadfully that they leaned forward to touch her…she felt suddenly the elemental fear of some other person who will not speak when spoken to…Blundering on alone, she came out at last, almost crying. (Hangsaman 380-81)
But unlike Brown, Natalie does not surrender to evil or despair. She comes to a clearing lit by a “ghastly and brazen clarity” recalling the fire-lit clearing in “Young Goodman Brown.” There Natalie is offered the chance to succumb to evil when Tony attempts to seduce her (383). Finally finding her own agency, Natalie rejects Tony, and Tony, like the Devil in “Young Goodman Brown” disappears, leaving Natalie to find her way back out of the woods. In the conversion paradigm, this moment operates spiritually as a rejection of sin and psychologically as the confrontation with, and release of, repressed trauma. Again, as in “Young Goodman Brown,” the physical reality of this event remains ambiguous as it is the result that is critical.
The Puritans believed that God would help the true convert by leading her into the light. Natalie comes to the highway where she is picked up by an angelic husband and wife who just happen to be driving that way. They take her to the center of town where Natalie proves that she has overcome the sin of despair by rejecting the thought of suicide. Natalie completes her conversion by receiving the equivalent of grace in her transition into a new wholly integrated self. Like the successful Puritan convert, Natalie experiences a “new world” and a “different aspect.” She is now “grown up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” and returns to her community reintegrated as a new person (387).
It is significant that one of Jackson’s original titles for Hangsaman was Rites of Passage. If we accept that Jackson, like Hawthorne, found inspiration in the themes of Puritan history, we must read Natalie’s “wilderness experience” through the lens of that history. Jackson knew that the Puritan conversion experience was fundamentally a rite of passage from sin to grace and from doubt to confidence. In Hangsaman she brilliantly applies the wilderness ritual, in both its physical and psychological contexts, to the inner mental struggle of a twentieth-century college student, while retaining the ritual’s full transformative power. Through Jackson’s artistry, the rite of passage from sin to grace unfinished by Young Goodman Brown finally reaches fruition in the rite of passage from adolescent fear to adult assurance completed by Natalie Waite. Unlike the Puritan conversion, which was only truly accomplished through an external divine force, Jackson interprets the ritual as an act of self-empowerment and discovery of personal autonomy. In Natalie’s world, evil has been manifested in antagonists who sought to rob her of that autonomy, whether physically, like the rapist at the party and Tony, or psychologically, like Natalie’s father, Tony, Anne and Vicki and other hostile students, and even Natalie herself. Natalie’s triumph over this evil, symbolized by her defeat of Tony, is accomplished by reaching within and finding her own sense of agency. This does not mean that she will no longer be met by evil. The Puritans knew that the convert would return to a community and world where evil still existed, but they believed that the gift of God’s grace armed the convert to oppose that evil. Similarly, Natalie will return to a college community and world where hostile forces may still seek to diminish her, but Jackson allows us to imagine that Natalie’s newly discovered personal power will arm her to face whatever battles may come.
Works Cited
Baciu, Iona. “Writing is Masculine, Gossip is Feminine: American Myths in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Possibility of Evil.’” Bulletin of the Polytechnic Institute of Iasi, Vol. 7, No. 1-2, 2021, pp. 39-51.
Bonikowski, Wyatt. “Only one antagonist’: The Daemon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson.” Gothic Studies, Vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, p. 84.
Brauer, Jerald C. “Conversion: From Puritanism to Revivalism.” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 58, no. 3, 1978, pp. 231-32.
Burnham, Michelle. “The Journey Between: Liminality and Dialogism in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative.” Early American Literature, Vol. 28, no. 1, 1993, p.65.
Carpenter, Lynette. “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We have Always Lived in the Castle.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 8, no. 1, 1984, pp. 32-8.
Clements, William C. “Conversion and Communitas.” Western Folklore, Vol. 35, no. 1, 1976, p.35.
Colacurcio, Michael J. The Promise of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales. Duke UP, 1995.
Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Liveright Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2003.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Selected Tales and Sketches, edited by Michael J. Colacurcio, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 134.
Hooker, Thomas. “The Application of Redemption.” Circa 1640. The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, edited by Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, Harvard UP, 1985, pp.177-78.
Ingram, Shelley. “Speaking of Magic: Folk Narrative in Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016, p. 62.
Jackson, Shirley. Novels and Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Library of America, 2010.
—. Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, edited by Ruth Franklin, Library of America, 2020.
Murphy, Bernice M. “’The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us’: Shirley Jackson’s New England Gothic.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005, pp. 104-26.
Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005, p. 248. Originally Published in Twentieth Century Literature, 1984.
Ringel, Faye. The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead. Anthem Press, 2022.
Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
Williams, David R. Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind. Associated University Presses, 1987.
[1] Hattenhauer bases his contention on his observation of Natalie’s previous mental instability.
[2] Ingram bases her contention on her interpretation of this scene as a reenactment of the myths surrounding the Goddess Diana in which the slayer of the challenger becomes the new watcher of Diana’s sacred grove. Ingram does not discuss the New England Puritan framework of this scene.
[3] In his Lacanian interpretation, Bonikowski contends that Jackson presents no viable path forward for Natalie’s jouissance.
[4] See: Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Liveright Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. I believe it to be significant that Franklin chooses a quotation from “Young Goodman Brown” for her epigraph to this biography.
[5] See: Parks, John G., “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005, p. 248. Originally published in Twentieth Century Literature, 1984.
[6] See: Baciu, Ioana. “Writing is Masculine, Gossip is Feminine: American Myths in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Possibility of Evil.’” Bulletin of the Polytechnic Institute of Iasi, Vol. 67, no. 1-2, 2021, pp. 39-51.
[7] Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
[8] See: Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales. Duke University Press, 1995.
[9] Hawthorne here references the description of Satan in John 14:30: “The prince of the world cometh; and he hath nothing in me.”
[10] 2 Cor. 11:14-15. (“Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”)
