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amansharma22 's review for:
Hangsaman
by Shirley Jackson
Perhaps the most chilling thing about trauma - especially in one’s formative years - is not the moment itself, but the way its reverberations echo throughout the rest of life. To me, Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman is a study in those echoes, and it left me dumbfounded, searching for answers, yet savoring that exquisite confusion that she is so famous for.
Jackson takes the concept of the bildungsroman and hangs it on its feet. Instead of the steady march toward selfhood, Natalie Waite, seventeen years old and on the precipice of college life, spirals into unraveling. Born to a narcissistic, domineering father and a worn-down alcoholic mother, she enters adulthood already falling apart. Her inner monologue betrays her fragility: How do I respond? What would others do? Who am I? Do I even exist? Her sense of self is almost sustained on her anxiety:
She is always in a liminal space - hallways and doorways with people on either end, the adolescence to adulthood transition, between reality and insanity - yet never seems fully present in any one space.
A traumatic incident before she leaves for college is like the wave of a rock dropped in water, only further amplified by the disorientation of college itself (a traumatic experience in its own right). Her male professors manipulate, her 'friends' exploit, and she is quickly marked as a black sheep. What follows is her descent into paranoia and depersonalization, her sense of self becoming as impermanent as the characters who come in and out of the novel without explanation.
In my opinion, the genius (and terror), of Hangsaman lies not in description but in suggestion. Characters appear important and vanish. Episodes slip into dreamlike trance. The narration goes from third-person to some secret other thing. The horror is implicit, hidden between the lines. What terrified me most was not what was on the page but what my own imagination supllied to fill in the blanks that Jackson so intentionally omits. Reading Hangsaman felt like being lured into complicity with Natalie’s unraveling, so much so that I caught myself afraid of my own imagination, as though I were going insane alongside her. I usually read before sleeping but I found myself having to do something in between because I was afraid of what my dreams would be like that night...
For me, that is what makes Hangsaman so extraordinary. It terrified me without blood or monsters, leaving me deeply unsettled. I intended it only as the first book of my “spooky season” reading list, yet I know it will haunt me well after Halloween. A reread feels inevitable, and I have a feeling it will reveal an entirely different face when I do.
Jackson takes the concept of the bildungsroman and hangs it on its feet. Instead of the steady march toward selfhood, Natalie Waite, seventeen years old and on the precipice of college life, spirals into unraveling. Born to a narcissistic, domineering father and a worn-down alcoholic mother, she enters adulthood already falling apart. Her inner monologue betrays her fragility: How do I respond? What would others do? Who am I? Do I even exist? Her sense of self is almost sustained on her anxiety:
“Perhaps - and this was her most persistent thought … suppose she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite … suppose she were someone else?”
She is always in a liminal space - hallways and doorways with people on either end, the adolescence to adulthood transition, between reality and insanity - yet never seems fully present in any one space.
A traumatic incident before she leaves for college is like the wave of a rock dropped in water, only further amplified by the disorientation of college itself (a traumatic experience in its own right). Her male professors manipulate, her 'friends' exploit, and she is quickly marked as a black sheep. What follows is her descent into paranoia and depersonalization, her sense of self becoming as impermanent as the characters who come in and out of the novel without explanation.
In my opinion, the genius (and terror), of Hangsaman lies not in description but in suggestion. Characters appear important and vanish. Episodes slip into dreamlike trance. The narration goes from third-person to some secret other thing. The horror is implicit, hidden between the lines. What terrified me most was not what was on the page but what my own imagination supllied to fill in the blanks that Jackson so intentionally omits. Reading Hangsaman felt like being lured into complicity with Natalie’s unraveling, so much so that I caught myself afraid of my own imagination, as though I were going insane alongside her. I usually read before sleeping but I found myself having to do something in between because I was afraid of what my dreams would be like that night...
For me, that is what makes Hangsaman so extraordinary. It terrified me without blood or monsters, leaving me deeply unsettled. I intended it only as the first book of my “spooky season” reading list, yet I know it will haunt me well after Halloween. A reread feels inevitable, and I have a feeling it will reveal an entirely different face when I do.