📘 Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman
(this book was read for 🐛bookbug in October 2026)
The beginning of Hangsaman is quite possibly the strangest piece of literature i've read in a while; it introduces us to the protagonist, Natalie Waite and her upper-middle class family, as they throw a small party on Sunday, initiated by her father, organised by her harrowed mother, and avoided entirely by her younger brother. It ought to be a matter of course, a routine event from the life of a family, written to expound upon the conditions our protagonist lives through, to introduce secondary characters and impart to them a degree of depth, and yet, it isn't. Something unsettling peers out from in between the lines.
Natalie is seventeen, off to college in a few weeks, she has constructed in her mind, a world away from the world, one where she has apparently murdered her lover, where she is under interrogation by a detective, a world she has interspersed into her every day life, and this too is nothing out of the ordinary. Natalie's father encourages her to write, he discusses his daughter's writing with her at length, he's a little overbearing about it, he's a writer himself, Natalie represents him, and he'd like to control that representation and Natalie along with it, while also turning her against her mother. In this, Natalie's world away from the world seems entirely pedestrian, both an escape from her father's control and an exercise in honing her writing skills. And yet, dread hangs over this Sunday morning.
Natalie's mother is a housewife, an unhappy one, forced into household labour at the cost of her ambitions, she is coming apart at the seams. Jackson builds dread indirectly, in the dispossession of women, starting with Natalie's mother, who delivers a series of dark omens concerning the future of a woman in mid-century USA. Her daughter does not listen, she's seventeen, she has her whole life ahead of her, surely she will avoid the mistakes her mother has made. And yet, in the safety of her own home, in the company of her father's acquaintances, a strange man leads Natalie away to the woods and rapes her. The horror of Hangsaman lodges itself into the text, rape is a non-event, known only to Natalie herself, and she lacks the language to convey its occurrence.
And so, it's off to college for Natalie, her very first time away from home, an opportunity to become an adult, an individual unto herself. But it all goes awry, Natalie is isolated from almost every other girl, separated from the ones who accept too easily and carelessly their place as sex objects for men, as well as the girls she deems ugly and unworthy of her attention; it's a novel from the Jim Crow era, eugenics haunts the text in the complete absence of Black, Native, and Latin Americans, and surfaces in Natalie's abhorrence of fat girls with odd hairlines, in her worrying about the appearance of her rapist, rather than on the trauma of the violent act she survives. Then she runs into Elizabeth Langdon, wife and former student of Arthur Langdon, a literature teacher at the college. Here she finds that even the most beautiful women can be discarded by men for younger, prettier prey. Elizabeth is drinking herself to death, while her husband carries on an affair with two of his current students in the permissive atmosphere of the women's college, well, permissive for the men at least.
The final act of Hangsaman sees Natalie making friends with the girl Tony, and follows them through a day spent together. Natalie spends the night in Tony's room instead of her own, the homosexual overtones are clear and unsubtle, the girls in Tony's dormitory titter with excitement at Natalie and Tony's impropriety. At dawn they rise, and go out into town, they play pretend at being adults, Natalie is disgusted at a disabled man they two girls share a table with, and then Tony invites Natalie to a secluded wood. Mirroring the end of the first section, Natalie walks into the darkness of the woods at the outskirts of town, clinging to Tony for reassurance, until it dawns upon her that Tony wants her, as the man at her father's party did. And this time, she refuses. It is easier to refuse the advances of a woman and Natalie finds her way out of the wood. Back in town, she is picked up by a passing car manned by a respectable heterosexual couple, she makes her way back to her dormitory, overjoyed at her entry into adulthood, at her graceful acceptance of an execution by hanging, in the high halls of heterosexuality, as all respectable young women from good families should.