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Related: About this forumRuth Franklin: Shirley Jackson and the Madness of Mid-Century Womanhood
Jacksons biographer on the authors fragmented female characters and her critical renaissancehttps://www.guernicamag.com/ruth-franklin-the-madness-of-mid-century-womanhood/
Hangsaman, Shirley Jacksons murky and disquieting 1951 novel, is a frantic read. It careens down unlit dormitory corridors and bounds around the psyche of its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Natalie Waite, as she arrives at college and plummets into psychological collapse. Suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny, Natalie wonders, her mental splintering already underway, suppose she were someone else? Soon, she develops an intimate friendship with a girl in her dorm named Tony who, it turns out, Natalie has invented.
Jacksons novel is hazy, filtered as it is through Natalie, and uneven in places. Tony slips in slowly, like toxic gas, only to disappear abruptly, leaving questions about Natalies mental state unanswered. But about the gendered nature of Natalies unravelling, Hangsaman is unambiguous: Natalie is at least partially undone by a sexual assault that occurs early in the novel, at her childhood home; more broadly, she is the product of an upper-middle-class 1950s America that does not care about resolving or supporting her personhood. The other women in her world include a faculty wife who, feeling her selfhood subsumed by her marriage, lives in alcoholic misery, and Natalies own mother, who throws elaborate garden parties in the suburbs and divulges, it isnt any single thing its just that this is the only life Ive got this is all.
Hangsaman is, in this respect, an early effort at what would become a career endeavour for Jackson: to explore the fragmentary internal landscape of her generation of women, often through themes of madness, fracturing, and disorientation. Jackson herself was a mother of four, and married to literary critic Stanley Hyman; while her love for her children and her Bennington home life permeates her writing (including in the autobiographical Life Among the Savages), she struggled to balance the demands of mid-century womanhood with her desire to produce serious literary works. Natalie is one manifestation of this tension.
Her body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era, writes biographer Ruth Franklin in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. The stories she tells form a powerful counternarrative to the feminine mystique, revealing the unhappiness and instability beneath the housewifes sleek veneer of competence. (In fact, Natalie Waites unravelling predated Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique by a dozen years.) Seventy years after its initial publication, Hangsamans prescience makes it worth revisiting. It also provides a sketchy roadmap of where Jackson would head later the unsettling, female-cantered psychological novels that were her late masterpieces.
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Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson and the Madness of Mid-Century Womanhood (Original Post)
Celerity
Jan 2022
OP
Scrivener7
(52,363 posts)1. Thank you! Putting it on the list.
I think most people remember her for The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery. The Lottery is shattering, but I never found the Haunting of Hill House to be as compelling as others did, though I love ghost stories. But some of her other work is amazing, and no one ever talks about it.
Thanks for reminding me to keep reading Shirley Jackson!