Natalie Waite is wanted for murder.
The hard-boiled detective questioning her has a dead body and mountains of evidence, and he wants to know where she was when the crime occurred, why her alibi doesn’t exactly add up, and whether she’s prepared to finally confess. “I refuse to say,” she tells him. Luckily for Natalie, though, this entire murder investigation is imaginary. She invented the detective, the murder, and the unfortunate nameless victim (though her father is certainly a promising candidate).
Natalie, the 17-year-old protagonist in Shirley Jackson’s 1951 exceedingly strange novel “Hangsaman,” is growing up under the considerable weight of her father’s considerable ego. She’s preparing to leave home for college, though she hasn’t quite figured out who she is beyond the person everyone expects her to be.
Jackson shows us that she’s clever, observant, imaginative, and remarkably unsure of herself, which isn’t exactly surprising given the fact that she’s spent her whole life being told by her pompous father, Arnold, exactly how she might improve. He reads — and corrects — her writing and treats their scheduled conversations in his study as opportunities to demonstrate the superior superiority of his own mind. A father’s love may be unconditional, but his editorial approval comes with more than a few revisions. Needless to say: Natalie has learned a lot from Arnold, including how to identify other people’s intellectual shortcomings and, unfortunately, how to scrutinize her own. Her mother, meanwhile, disappeared into the misery of being married to Arnold and offers her daughter a rather dismal preview of womanhood.
“Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie,” begins one entry in Natalie’s journal, where the writer — Natalie — assures her beloved correspondent that someday the people who laugh at her will be too frightened to speak in her presence. Natalie signs off with a rather grandiose promise of revenge. Her imagination, then, serves to give her the freedom to be mischievous and entirely in control of her own stories.
Jackson is a genius at characterization; her characters here are neurotic, whimsical, vain, ridiculous, and still somehow recognizably human. Arnold — whose intellectual vanity has essentially become a substitute for him having a personality — is the kind of man who thinks having the last word means having the right answer. And while Natalie’s detective might seem like a harmless childhood invention, there’s something rather telling about a girl whose imaginary friend is yet another authoritative man whose sole purpose seems to be to question her every move. Even inside her own head, Natalie can’t escape being told what to think.
But Jackson has something considerably more sinister in store for Natalie. During a party that her parents have thrown at their house, an older male starts to ask her questions that start to resemble those of Natalie’s imaginary detective. The man then leads an intoxicated Natalie into the woods, and the narrative implies that some sort of sexual assault takes place. Natalie once entertained herself by imagining being behind some sort of terrible crime; now, she’s the victim of a real one. And the detective who demanded answers about an imaginary murder has nothing to say about an actual violation. He disappears — because Natalie no longer needs to invent terrible things happening to understand that terrible things can happen.
“Nothing happened,” she repeats, attempting to make the words true through sheer insistence.
A stranger to herself
The assault changes the way we experience Natalie’s imagination. She continues inventing things, but her fantasies increasingly raise questions about who exactly Natalie Waite actually is. Natalie’s thoughts, memories, and imagined experiences begin to run together, and her sense of who she is grows just as uncertain. Jackson pulls us deeper into that confusion, leaving us to untangle what actually happened from what Natalie thinks happened — through the eyes of a girl who may no longer know the difference herself.
At college, she entertains the possibility that her entire life might be somebody else’s dream, experienced in a split second under anesthesia. Perhaps the real person is an old woman or a child or someone who lived long before she was born. One day that stranger might wake up and describe the bizarre inventions of the dream: television, an atomic bomb, a girl named Natalie Waite. The possibility troubles Natalie, but it also comforts her: Somewhere beyond the demands of being herself, another existence might be waiting. Later, Jackson has Natalie rearrange the letters of her own name, producing strange variations on an identity she seems increasingly uncertain how to inhabit. She’s so good at imagining other lives that she can practically write herself out of existence.
Jackson makes the reader an active participant in Natalie’s confusion. Jackson’s third-person narration slips in and out of Natalie’s thoughts, dreams, and stories without signaling that there has been some sort of transition. Sometimes, an imagined exchange carries the same weight as an actual conversation; sometimes, Natalie’s perception of a situation becomes so distorted that we have little idea what’s really happening. The effect is extraordinary, though it can also be exhausting. I spent much of “Hangsaman” admiring Jackson’s command of language while wishing she would give the story a little room to breathe. Her writing occasionally becomes so dense that it obscures the girl at the story’s center.
The middle section, in particular, meanders through college politics, strange incidents, and Natalie’s involvement with the self-important Professor Arthur Langdon and his miserable, maybe suicidal 21-year-old wife (and former student of his), Elizabeth. Their unhappy marriage neatly echoes her parents’, but I quickly grew pretty tired of their domestic drama.
Natalie could probably sympathize with needing some space. She’s increasingly claustrophobic, removing furniture from her room to create space and struggling with the proximity of other people. During a particularly distressing bus ride, she realizes that “all her efforts to become separate” have somehow delivered her into another kind of captivity. Even her thoughts seem crowded with the expectations, judgments, and voices of people who have spent her entire life telling her who she should be.
Natalie continues to exchange letters with her father, snappy writing that’s a little spot of brilliance in an otherwise frustratingly sluggish middle section that shows the gap between the cheerful college experience she describes to him and the miserable one she’s actually experiencing. Neither seems particularly interested in disrupting the version of the other person that exists in their correspondence and are happy to write back and forth with someone who doesn’t quite exist. And Natalie, whose sense of self is growing increasingly uncertain, has begun constructing yet another identity for herself — this time in words her father can read.
But just when Natalie’s isolation feels almost unbearable, she makes a friend.
Me, myself, and Tony
College hasn’t been an escape from being young and female for Natalie. Instead, it’s where she has discovered a whole collection of people who seem determined to make her miserable. Her classmates are cliquish and cruel, and Jackson captures all the petty humiliations of being a young woman. I can only imagine what she would have made of modern sorority recruitment.
So by the time Tony appears, Natalie is desperately lonely, increasingly unsure of herself, and still struggling to find out where she belongs.
Their friendship develops out of a series of strange encounters, and Tony quickly becomes the closest thing Natalie has to a confidante. She’s bold and irreverent, and she has all the confidence Natalie lacks, along with an imagination capable of keeping pace with hers. She can match Natalie’s considerable wit, and their conversations are absolutely glorious; the girls invent increasingly ridiculous stories, play elaborate word and tarot games, and improvise entire fictional worlds for their own considerable amusement. It’s in this part of the book that Jackson’s dialogue becomes wonderfully zippy and playful, full of the kind of verbal invention that makes reading a brilliant writer such a pleasure.
After Natalie has experienced so much anxiety and psychological disorientation, Tony offers Natalie the freedom to experiment with being someone other than the version everyone knows. Their friendship is intimate and wonderfully strange, and Natalie seems more comfortable with this mysterious girl than she has with anyone else in the novel. Tony gives her companionship, confidence, and a place to explore all the parts of herself that she hasn’t exactly ever known what to do with.
Tony arrives so abruptly that I wondered whether I’d missed her introduction — Who was this girl? Where had she come from? And how was she so perfectly suited to Natalie? All of that makes Tony one of the novel’s great mysteries. Is she real, an imaginary companion, or a manifestation of Natalie’s fractured consciousness? Jackson provides enough ambiguity to sustain several interpretations, and as we try to establish what’s real, the less certain anything becomes. Because we’ve spent so much time inside Natalie’s head that we’re no longer sure of which people might exist outside it.
Natalie knows the detective is imaginary, but with Tony, she may no longer recognize the boundaries of her own invention. Natalie’s imagination, once a place where she could control the story, has become a whole world that she can’t entirely control. But Tony becomes increasingly possessive and controlling, and she eventually begins to resemble the very people that Natalie has spent her life trying to escape. At one point, Tony describes what happens when you invent someone clever enough to defeat your enemies: “you invent them so smart you’ve got a new enemy.” If Tony represents a fractured part of Natalie, then Natalie has somehow come to fear the very version of herself she created for comfort.
Their final adventure takes them into the woods, where Tony promises a place beyond any scrutiny. But the trip becomes increasingly frightening, and when Natalie begs to leave, Tony refuses. “Later I might let you go back,” she says. The setting echoes Natalie’s assault, with its isolation, fear, and loss of control. Here, once again, Natalie has found herself at the mercy of someone who ignores her wishes. This time, however, she recognizes the danger and resists. She recognizes that the confidence, freedom, and companionship she sought through Tony can’t come at the cost of surrendering her identity to another person — even one she might have invented. Natalie eventually rejects Tony and leaves the woods, recognizing that “everything is waiting for me to act without someone else.” But the apparent victory involves a troubling kind of loss: If Tony represents some part of Natalie, her departure might mean reclaiming control over her identity — or abandoning something valuable about herself.
In her journal, Natalie once promised herself that someday everyone would recognize how extraordinary she was. Maybe she’s starting to recognize that herself. Natalie claims to be less concerned with what other people think of her, though I’m not entirely sure that she has finished figuring out what she thinks of herself. The novel ends with Natalie heading back to college, where all of the people and pressures that helped further unravel her sense of self are still waiting. But maybe, just maybe, Natalie no longer needs another version of herself to face them.
