Thanks for reading Alienated Young Woman! This is the second article in a series on Shirley Jackson. Subscribe for free to keep up with this series, receive new posts, and support my work. Disclaimer: This review discusses extensive plot details of Hangsaman, including the ending.
I. The Bildungsroman
“Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old, but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years—since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inexplicably located on a spot of ground, favored with sense, and feet, and a bright red sweater, and most obscurely alive—she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind.”
Shirley Jackson’s fiction lives comfortably in the world of the uncanny, that Freudian realm of disturbance where conditions are definitively unsettling, but in a way that feels strangely familiar. Things are just south of normal.
Her fiction lives less comfortably, however—or at least less recognizably—in the world of the bildungsroman. This perception has little to do with Jackson’s writing itself, which is plenty concerned with young people and their coming of age. Many, if not most, of the author’s protagonists are new to adulthood or maladjusted to it, negotiating their place as women on their own in the world and in some phase of leaving home. We Have Always Lived in the Castle’s Merricat Blackwood, The Bird’s Nest’s Elizabeth Richmond, and The Haunting of Hill House’s Eleanor Vance, among others, are all young women in various stages of the transition from dependent daughter to adult woman, on a journey that, by the end of the novel, will see them with a new outlook on life. If anything, Jackson’s witty-but-depressed, hyper-observant, unconventional young women feel ahead of their time, like a peek at the narrators of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Mona Awad’s Bunny six decades before they actually came to fruition.
Still, there’s something about Jackson’s horror tendencies—the fact that these women, in the midst of their bildungsromane, are wont to see the occasional poltergeist—that seems to make us more hesitant to categorize her in this genre. Instead, Jackson’s alienated young woman protagonists of the 50s live in the shadows of her superior reputation as a horror writer, faded in our cultural memory like the forgotten older half-sisters of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which came a decade later to higher praises.
Regardless of how we categorize its genre, Jackson’s writing tended to orbit around two cores: hauntings—real or imagined—and disappearance. Less prominently, Jackson circled a third, the feminine coming of age. But Hangsaman, Jackson’s oft-overlooked second novel, has all three. The novel follows Natalie Waite, a precocious 17-year-old writer who lives an alienated life in suburbia with her disengaged mother and brother and her overbearing literary critic father, with whom she maintains an increasingly precarious relationship. (He tells her, shortly before she leaves for school, that he fully expects she will go through a period of hating him as she comes of age.) After being assaulted at one of her father’s dinner parties, she buries the trauma and begins her freshman year at a secluded women’s college in small-town Vermont, where she slowly begins to lose her grip on reality.
Hangsaman is a novel about disappearing. And, at least nominally, it’s one loosely based on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, an 18-year-old freshman at Bennington College (the never-named setting of Hangsaman) who went missing from the woods surrounding the school’s campus in 1946, never to be found. Though Welden’s disappearance was certainly a major news event at the time, Jackson had an even deeper connection: her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was an English professor at Bennington when Welden disappeared. Still, Jackson’s reimagining of the event is far from the sort of sensational true crime novel we’d see a few years later with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Instead, Jackson is largely unconcerned with the details of the real-life case—Welden, for Jackson, is something more like a loose prompt, a writerly exercise. She’s not quite a subject, but the jumping-off point for a story where Jackson would hash out her eventual literary signatures. In Natalie Waite, Jackson flexes her muscles as a horror writer, but she also fleshes out her version of the bildungsroman.
From the moment we first encounter Natalie, she is already a character who lives primarily in the deep recesses of her own mind. She is hyperaware, and anxious, about her lack of life experiences, lamenting she has no time “to form a workable personality to take along” to college. By 17, she’s started to feel like time is running out—in 17 years more, “or as long as she had wasted being a child or a small girl, silly and probably playing,” she laments, “she would be 34, and old.” She self-soothes by “imagining the sweet, sharp sensation of being burned alive.”
But after the assault—so wholly traumatic that the book jumps ahead in time rather than describe it—her life seems cleaved in two. She arrives at school determined to reinvent herself, but once there, all of her surroundings seem a warped mirror image of her home life. Her soothing visions of burning alive become more antagonistic visions of campus as a dollhouse, her classmates and professors as dolls whom she eats in one mouthful. She becomes infatuated with Arthur Langdon, an English professor about her father’s age, but, in the midst of her obsession, begins to feel exactly what Arnold Waite warned she would feel toward himself: she sees Arthur for what he is—narcissistic and middling in talent—and begins to hate him.
Then, Natalie experiences the most unsettling event yet: she meets Tony, another isolated young woman. For the rest of Hangsaman, Tony consistently nurses in Natalie a rebellious streak that in turn further isolates her from the rest of the student body. Tony, this more fiercely independent, sometimes menacing foil to Natalie, zeroes in on the latter’s loneliness and fear in the wake of her trauma to push her boundaries—except all the while, we’re never quite sure if Tony is real at all. For Natalie Waite, the horror and the coming of age are one and the same.
If Natalie Waite feels ahead of her time, it’s perhaps because the contemporary alienated young woman feels—more so than she ever felt like Plath’s Esther Greenwood—like a mirror-image of Natalie as uncanny as Tony herself. Like both Esther and Natalie before her, this contemporary protagonist is so often a precocious writer,1 and so often is she passively ignoring mental illness or some other trauma.2 Like Natalie, so often is she wrapped up in affairs with someone older and more powerful as the author revisits this power dynamic from a place of less naivete.3 So often does her grasp of the real begin to slip before our eyes. So often is she wallowing in New England.4 And more often than anything else is she living in the deepest recesses of her own mind.
In the shadow of The Bell Jar, it may have been Hangsaman quietly mothering the contemporary alienated young woman as her campus novel offshoots took shape. At the very least, Hangsaman is a novel we can’t seem to stop resurrecting, even as the forgetting continues. In Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2017)—which in its seven years of existence seems to have earned modern classic status in its own right—we see traces of Natalie in protagonist Selin’s hyper-observant, emotionally removed narration. Though Batuman opts for first-person instead of Jackson’s free indirect discourse, her almost anthropological prose still serves much the same purpose as Jackson’s run-on observations do for Natalie: a shield for the tender, afraid young person underneath.
It’s not the only contemporary campus novel to revel in the echoes of Hangsaman. In Bronwyn Fischer’s The Adult, a college freshman, also a writer named Natalie, moves through her campus in a pseudo-trance not unlike how Natalie Waite moves through Bennington, alienated from both parents and classmates until she becomes infatuated with an older love interest. Like Natalie Waite sixty years before her, this Natalie’s attempts to negotiate her place as a writer become disrupted by her progressively loosening grip. For both Natalies, becoming the titular “adult” feels mostly like playing pretend.
In fact, Jackson writ large seems to manifest in the alienated young college girl. Daisy Alpert Florin’s autofiction My Last Innocent Year (a novel similarly loosely based on real history) evokes the imagery of multiple Jackson favorites. The novel’s protagonist, Isabel, buries the memory of her sexual assault on a small college campus in New England, throwing herself full throttle into infatuation with a 40-year-old English professor—a Hangsaman-esque premise to be sure. But Isabel mimics more of Jackson’s work than just Hangsaman, pulling details from short stories like “Family Treasures,” in which an orphaned college student compulsively steals from her dorm-mates, using her tragic background to divert attention away from her if the thefts are noticed. (Florin’s protagonist develops a similar kleptomaniacal streak in high school after her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, even going so far as to wear the stolen items in the presence of her victims, and considers returning to this habit in moments of great stress during college.) Left and right, Jackson and Hangsaman brew under the surface of the contemporary alienated young woman.
But perhaps Hangsaman has lived so long in the shadows of the college girl’s bildungsroman, unrecognized for the foundation it provided, because that genre was always only part of the story. Instead, maybe we should consider it as the sort of novel for which Jackson is better known—one about disappearing women and their ghosts.
II. The Haunting
“Seventeen years was a very long time to have been alive, if you took it into proportion by the thought that in seventeen years more—or as long as she had wasted being a child or a small girl, silly and probably playing—she would be thirty-four, and old.”
Hangsaman is unquestionably a young woman’s bildungsroman, and one that follows—if not sets outright—many conventions of the contemporary campus novel. It holds all the hallmarks of the two genres, and Natalie Waite, like all good bildungsroman protagonists, indeed returns with a new outlook on life. “As she had never been before,” Jackson writes in a striking ending that does not even scratch the surface of the author’s most striking endings, “she was now alone, and grown up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.”
But something else brews underneath Hangsaman, not just the natural isolation of the alienated young woman. Under the veneer of the bildungsroman is a novel that could only have come from a writer long past their own coming of age, grappling with a different stage of life entirely. Something festers in the pen of an author fresh off the height of her literary stardom, a decade into an often-contentious marriage with a philandering, controlling literary critic, imagining herself in the story of the disappeared young girl.
There are, in fact, many things bubbling under the surface of Hangsaman. For one, it feels impossible to ignore that, though Jackson’s connection to the real-life Welden case existed because Hyman was on Bennington’s faculty during the disappearance, in Hangsaman, we see Hyman reflected back not just in the character of Arthur, the all-important English professor, but in Arnold, Natalie’s father.
Arnold and Arthur’s presence in the novel has an almost prescient quality that—if not eerie enough on its own—only cements when you read the writing in the context of the marriage under which it was written. We have thought about Hangsaman as a product of the Welden case, but by the same token, could it be considered a product of the relationship between Jackson and Hyman? What changes in our reading when we read Hangsaman with hindsight, decades after Jackson’s untimely death, knowing that just one year later, Hyman would remarry to his former Bennington student, a classmate of his daughter with Jackson? What changes when we consider that Jackson’s novels, from Hangsaman forward, would circle domestic discontent until they became all-out love letters to women liberated, by death, from their husbands and fathers? Perhaps Hangsaman is an alienated young woman novel that Jackson could only write because she was—long married, in the weeds of chronic illness, and no stranger to notoriety—no longer a young woman herself. Perhaps, if there is a ghost looming over Hangsaman, that ghost is Stanley Edgar Hyman.
It’s not that Jackson’s own life was so unlike Natalie’s that she was void of parents to blame. In her seminal biography of Jackson, Ruth Franklin wrote extensively about Jackson’s cruel, emotionally abusive mother, Geraldine, who openly admitted she had not wanted her daughter and regularly berated Shirley about her appearance and supposed lack of femininity. Even once Jackson had moved across the country and made a name for herself as a writer, Geraldine’s abuses continued—she would send her daughter letters insulting her appearance, criticizing her lifestyle, and worst of all, panning her writing.
But neither of Natalie Waite’s parents read quite like what we know of Geraldine. Natalie’s mother, for one, is certainly emotionally removed, but not outwardly abusive or even particularly critical. And Mr. Waite’s criticism, though perhaps just as cutting as Geraldine’s, is largely unconcerned with Natalie’s appearance or her performance of femininity, even if he holds his own wife to certain regressive standards about hers. Instead, Mr. Waite is, fundamentally, a literary critic, a position that defines his parenting style just as much as it does his career. It’s not quite Geraldine who seems to haunt Jackson on the page—the phantom takes the other shape.
And indeed, though Franklin dutifully documents Geraldine’s abuses, she’s unhesitant to blame Hyman for catalyzing Jackson’s later struggles with substance abuse. Hyman was once, we’re told, a “boy wonder”—a staff critic for The New Yorker by age 24. But his career would plateau, then pitter off into the obscurity of academia, before Jackson’s even took off. When his and Jackson’s children were young, he would accept a professorship at Bennington, a small women’s college in Vermont, where he would remain for the rest of his career. He was generally beloved by his students, but he also had sexual relationships with several. One alum would later write that for Bennington girls, “the first thing you heard of [Jackson] was that she was a witch.”
Jackson met Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University after Jackson published a short story in a campus literary magazine that prompted Hyman, a fan, to declare he must meet—and marry—the author. Once they were married, however, Hyman’s antiquated, unrealistic expectations attached to the role of “wife,” and Jackson’s relegation to that role after moving to Bennington, meant she felt—according to Franklin—constantly oppressed by her husband. Even once Jackson’s short stories made her the ostensible breadwinner of the family, it was Hyman who obsessively controlled their finances, meting out his wife’s own earnings to back her as an allowance. It was one of the many ways the one-time boy wonder seemed to cope with his inferior success. As Franklin tells it, he took equal comfort in claiming his wife’s literary genius came to her in a trance-like fugue, producing work she could only understand if her intellectually superior husband gallantly explained it back to her, the same way he regurgitated her money. Not to mention his “principled insistence on sleeping with other women” (mostly students), his expectation that his wife “listen good-naturedly to accounts of his sexual adventures,” or his argument when she pushed back on his nonmonogamy that, “if it turns you queasy, you are a fool.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Jackson’s writing simmers with domestic rage. This resentment, slow and steady, builds up throughout her career just as creeping dread builds up in her protagonists, until it boils over. By the end of her truncated life, Jackson was writing about widows and orphans who reveled in their newfound freedom with novels like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Come Along With Me. But long before then, her rage manifested in Hangsaman.
And so, it’s Hyman who shows up in Natalie Waite’s controlling father, far more than Jackson’s own toxic parent. Arnold Waite disregards his wife almost entirely, basking in his own supposed literary genius while tasking her with the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and hostessing for his regular, unannounced literary salons. Natalie’s mother, meanwhile, exists eternally on the periphery, her subjugated status stranding her somewhere in the back of Natalie’s mind, never quite a whole person. But Arnold is equally Hyman-esque in the way he approaches his daughter. He reads her writing obsessively, taking great pains to carefully explain her own brilliance back to her. He is more than a bit resentful of her talent, a talent the reader doesn’t have to see to know has already surpassed Arnold’s own. He tells her, shortly before she leaves for Bennington, that he has made his peace with her hatred. Jackson and Hyman, the two actors in a decades-long contentious marriage, loom like two ghosts over Natalie Waite, their turmoil corrupting her story and reshaping it in their warped image.
Perhaps Hangsaman truly was an act of clairvoyance. Maybe its prescience cements if you stay with Jackson’s writing long enough to get to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, when, fed up with his domineering, a daughter murders her father. Maybe the project of Hangsaman becomes clearer after you’ve stayed longer, enough to learn that Come Along With Me, the novel Jackson was writing when she died, told the story of a middle-aged widow for whom her husband’s death is a sudden liberation, and who acts on her new freedom by reinventing herself entirely. Or maybe it requires a big-picture analysis, the realization that for the rest of her career after Hangsaman, Jackson would continually return to stories about domestic discontent, and even more often to stories about disappearing girls and women.
III. The Disappearing Act
“The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them, and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.”
The ghosts of Jackson and Hyman may also be the force keeping Hangsaman solidly out of the realm of the true crime novel. But then, two things can be true at once: Hangsaman is a novel that only exists because of Jackson’s proximity to the Welden disappearance, which must have dominated cultural conversations in the tiny town of Bennington, Vermont, and Hangsaman is not actually about Paula Jean Welden at all. In fact, Hangsaman is not even really about imagining a Paula Jean Welden-like character, or exploring what may have happened to such a character from the point where the young woman’s real story tapers off. Hangsaman is about Shirley Jackson, imagining herself in Paula Jean Welden’s place: as a disappearing woman.
In that sense, Hangsaman was the beginning of an era: for the rest of her career, Jackson would circle the disappearing woman. The narrator of Come Along With Me moves to a new city, where she knows no one and no one knows her, and changes her name. The titular protagonist of Jackson’s 1960 short story “Louisa, Please Come Home” disappears so completely that her family doesn’t even recognize her when she finally attempts to return. Hill House’s Eleanor Vance accepts a spontaneous offer to leave behind her lonely life and relocate with a group of strangers to the mysterious titular estate, never to return at all.
For the disappeared women, disappearing is sometimes a curse, forcing them into unwanted isolation or teaching them a lesson about the dangers of wanting too much, but it’s often something less clear. Louisa of “Louisa, Please Come Home” desires in earnest to return to the comfort of her family, but finds her disappearance has erased all trace of her former life, making return impossible. Meanwhile, Eleanor Vance is dead at Hill House’s hands, but what sort of life would she have had if she hadn’t chosen to disappear in the first place? How unsatisfactory would it have been? As to the nature of disappearance in Come Away With Me, which begins with a woman finding freedom in her disappearing and which, like Jackson, comes to a halt before is true end, we’ll likely never know. The women of Jackson’s oeuvre are, for better or for worse, perpetually severing their ties from home.
Perhaps this has something to do with Jackson’s own life in Bennington. Perhaps, like her resentment, a fascination with disappearance grew slowly, its seeds planted by the rapid notoriety she gained after “The Lottery,” fertilized by the sharp sting of critical rejection in literary circles that failed to see the significance of a housewife’s ramblings about the macabre. Perhaps the branches of her desire grew with her husband’s retrograde gender norms, fed by his rampant philandering with former students. Perhaps we should read Jackson’s more humorous concession in the autofictional Life Among the Savages that she sometimes fantasized, in the most chaotic moments of parenthood, about leaving it all behind, as a sentiment that permeated her later work. Perhaps, somehow, the knowledge had already taken root in her that years after her sudden death—once he had already remarried—only after Jackson was gone forever from his life, Hyman himself would take care to publish Come Along With Me, that forever-unfinished story about a disappearing widow, with a preface admonishing those who failed to recognize his late wife’s literary genius.
Perhaps then, reimagining Paula Jean Welden became such an effective writerly exercise for Jackson because it allowed her to imagine a fate she could not or did not enact in real life—leaving everything behind, starting over, beginning anew. Perhaps the impossibility of enacting that future for herself is why so many of Jackson’s disappearing women met tragic fates to begin with. Perhaps that’s why the Jackson women who don’t disappear, like the Blackwood sisters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle or Orianna Halloran of The Sundial, seem doomed to another tragic domestic fate, eventually finding themselves so bound up in their homes that woman and house become inextricable. As one crumbles, so too does the other.
Or perhaps Hangsaman was always just that: a writerly exercise. In either case, from almost the moment Jackson achieved literary fame—or perhaps earlier, from the moment she arrived in Vermont—it seemed the author was perpetually enraptured by the idea of a woman who disappears.
No such fate befalls Natalie Waite, however. Hangsaman climaxes with Natalie in the woods, the last place the real Paula Jean Welden was seen alive. But unlike Welden, Natalie is not alone. She’s with Tony, the enigmatic, beloved classmate and friend; except suddenly, Tony doesn’t seem so admirable by moonlight. She taunts Natalie for her hesitance to wander deeper into the woods, suddenly appearing so menacing that Natalie begins to think Tony must have been sent to kill her as part of some elaborate scheme. Eventually, Tony departs—or possibly evaporates into thin air—abandoning Natalie, who is left to stumble alone through the woods. But just as her fate seems set, she’s greeted by Jackson’s most uncanny of twists. A couple drives past—one that looks almost like her own parents and speaks of a daughter almost like Natalie—and offers her a lift. They fear for girls being out in the woods. Can’t ever tell what will happen to a girl alone, they warn. They return her to the bridge at the center of town, and, for a brief moment, Natalie considers jumping over, truly disappearing once and for all. Instead, she turns around and heads back toward campus.
To be fair, there certainly are fatalistic readings of Hangsaman’s final act. Perhaps Natalie never quite recovers from that initial trauma. Perhaps Tony is a figment of her imagination, evidence of her mental unraveling, or perhaps Natalie is correct, and Tony is part of some elaborate plan to kill her—perhaps she succeeds. Perhaps everything we see in that final chapter, from the moment when Natalie enters the same woods where Welden last made contact with the outside world, is imaginary to begin with. Or perhaps any one of Paula Jean Welden’s possible fates befalls her—she is abducted, or killed, or loses her way in the dark. Perhaps she never makes it out at all.
But Hangsaman is not just a tale of disappearance. For all its simmering rage, all its ghosts, all its desire to vanish forever, the novel isn’t fatalistic. Instead, despite all the despair shrouding its real-life circumstances—from Welden’s eventual cold case status to Jackson’s chronic illness that would end in premature death—Hangsaman is defiantly hopeful. Natalie Waite’s life is not over—this may be a ghost story, but it’s still her bildungsroman, after all. Natalie, we learn, is neither Welden nor Jackson: her time is just beginning.
And so, in Hangsaman’s final scene, just when Natalie is at her closest to the real-life Welden, Jackson divorces her novel from its inspirations altogether, imagining the one fate we know for certain could not have come to pass. Natalie returns: out of the woods, to the reassuring bulk of college campus buildings, back to the bildungsroman and the uncanny valley where Jackson’s stories live. She has left it all behind—her father, her fear, her own and Jackson’s ghosts—and still she reemerges. She has become the impossibility, and in doing so has revealed Hangsaman, in all its horrors, to be just that: a reimagining of impossibilities. A hand not unlike her mother’s leads her to another life. She begins anew.
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Collage by the author.
See also: The Idiot by Elif Batuman, My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer, Bunny by Mona Awad, and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, among others.
See also: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Bunny by Mona Awad, Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin, Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda, My Last Innocent Year, and My Dark Vanessa.
See also: The Adult, My Dark Vanessa, and My Last Innocent Year.
See also: The Idiot (Harvard), Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Brown), My Dark Vanessa (elite boarding school in Maine), My Last Innocent Year (fictional, Bennington-esque liberal arts college in Rhode Island), Disorientation (fictional, Bennington-esque grad program in Massachusetts), Bunny (fictional, Bennington-esque liberal arts college in unspecified greater New England), Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress (fictional visual arts college in unspecified greater New England), Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (fictional small town in a different part of unspecified greater New England), and many, many more.