A Vague and Voiceless Yearning: Stages of Development and the Search for Identity in Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman
Katie Bonevento, University of Florida
Introduction
This paper will examine Shirley Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman (1951), through the lens of developmental psychology. Hangsaman is a gothic bildungsroman; its plot follows a young woman named Natalie Waite as she leaves for college and grapples with an existential crisis. Drawing from ideas pioneered by Jean Piaget, the paper will argue that Natalie’s character development throughout the novel mirrors the stages of development through which children pass as they grow up and eventually mature into adults.
The novel positions Natalie’s leaving for college as a rebirth, but this next phase of development is stunted by a variety of traumas, including years of emotional abuse from her overbearing father and what is heavily implied to be a sexual assault shortly before she leaves home. Because of this, she remains mired in the egocentrism Piaget describes as characteristic of the preoperational stage; as she descends deeper into turmoil, she even loses her sense of object permanence— according to Piaget, a hallmark of the earliest stage of development. Key to this regression is Tony, a hallucinated figure that plays the role of an imaginary friend, personifying the confident young woman that Natalie dreams of becoming. However, it soon becomes apparent to Natalie that the complete freedom that Tony offers is a childish conception of adulthood, and in order to truly grow up, she must leave Tony behind. This abandonment of childhood comes with a feeling of regret, but the novel’s end makes it clear that Natalie can face her future with newfound confidence.
The Beginning of the Journey
At the novel’s beginning, Natalie is something of a blank slate; even her name— derived from the root “natal”— evokes images of birth and newness. On the novel’s very first page, in fact, the narrator informs the reader that Natalie “was seventeen years old but... felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen” (Jackson 3); her reawakened, burgeoning adult self is effectively two years old, placing her on the boundary between Piaget’s first two stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor and preoperational (Sapolsky 176). She feels that she lacks “a workable personality to take along” when she leaves for college (Jackson 4), and spends much of her time immersed in a variety of fantasies in an attempt to escape her dysfunctional family. It is in these fantasies that the reader can first glimpse Natalie’s general mindset and guess at her discontents. She imagines “the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive” (Jackson 10) to chase away anxieties about growing up, and sustains a dialogue with an imaginary detective questioning her about a murder throughout the novel’s first chapter. In her conversations with the detective, Natalie tends to take on a confident, self-assured persona that hints at her ultimate desire for control, freedom, and adulthood— “I may be in danger every moment of my life… but I am strong within myself,” she tells the detective at one point (Jackson 8). This propensity towards fantasy not only indicates that Natalie is not satisfied with her current reality, but recalls a young child’s fascination with imaginative play.
The core of Natalie’s struggle is put into words by a woman named Verna, who she meets at a party thrown by her parents: “Never rest until you have uncovered your essential self… Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors,” she tells Natalie (Jackson 29). Natalie desperately wants to find this idealized, perfected identity, but is too caught up in others’ perceptions of her to become truly confident in who she is. She feels torn between aspirations to greatness and a desire to live a normal and comfortable life— in one moment, she is despairing that “the gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained [is]… something unsolvable,” (Jackson 23), and in the next she is “pretending to be a young girl… protected by her parents, beloved, sheltered here in this house” (Jackson 30). Her incessant worrying about what others think of her leads her to dissociate from reality: later in the aforementioned party scene, it is implied that she is sexually assaulted by a man who takes advantage of her distraction. As he leads her away from the party, Natalie wonders if “perhaps… he is now talking to some Natalie he thought he had hold of” (Jackson 41); even when she faces a clear physical danger, she is too focused on the way her assailant perceives her to completely register what is going on. Clear parallels can be drawn to the ideas of ego boundaries and egocentrism in developmental psychology; Natalie cannot yet conceptualize that “there is a ‘me’ separate from everyone else” (Sapolsky 177) and therefore places undue importance on others’ perceptions of her, considering them equally important to her perception of herself.
Delusions of Grandeur
When Natalie leaves home and arrives at college, it initially seems like a positive change. She has finally been granted a measure of freedom from her domineering father, and is delighted to have, in her dorm room, a private space that she can call her own. She thinks of it as “precisely, a new start” (Jackson 50), but it is clear that her lingering trauma has further stunted her development. Instead of completely dissociating herself from her father, she continues to write to him and respond to his condescending letters, and Darryl Hattenhauer writes that Arthur Langdon, the professor that Natalie develops a fixation on, is a “double of [her father]’s… an English professor with an eye for students and a cock-pecked wife” (104-105). She denies the truth of her assault, repeating the phrases “I don’t remember, nothing happened” over and over in her mind (Jackson 43). Her constant self-obsessed worrying intensifies— in a scene in which she meets the other girls living in her dorm, she spends the whole time wondering how they are perceiving her rather than attempting to speak to or make friends with any of them. “Will they all notice I am sitting almost alone?” she thinks. “Was someone regarding Natalie, identifying her by some extraordinary characteristic which Natalie did not know or had forgotten or had convinced herself no one saw?” (Jackson 54). Natalie copes with this fear of being “suddenly, permanently” identified (Jackson 55) as having a certain characteristic and being placed in a box by her peers by isolating herself from them; however, this backfires when she finds that the other girls term her “crazy” and “spooky” because she shuns their company (Jackson 68-69). This revelation causes her to retreat even deeper into “her own sweet dear home of a mind, where she was safe, protected, priceless” (Jackson 69). Her egocentrism grows stronger, as she uses it to soften the emotional blows caused by the social rejection she faces. “You are the best,” she writes to herself in a journal entry, “and they will know it someday, and someday no one will ever dare laugh again when you are near, and no one will dare even speak to you without bowing first. And they will be afraid of you” (Jackson 71-72). Disheartened by her social failures, she daydreams of academic success and scholarly recognition, repeatedly imagining her professors complimenting her on her superior intellect (Jackson 74). Taking refuge in “her own possessive pride in herself,” Natalie’s dissociation from reality becomes even more pronounced (Jackson 87).
Questioning Reality
However, this state of narcissistic self-assurance is not to last. Natalie’s fixation on others’ perceptions of her has remained just as strong— at one point, she sits in a common area of her dorm “hoping that someone would notice her, and comment, perhaps, on her professional manner of smoking” (Jackson 98). It becomes clear that her conviction of her own superiority is merely a superficial affectation that is undermined by her desire for others’ validation. She looks to Arthur Langdon as the main source for this validation, and is continually disappointed in him. She thinks “it [seems] almost callous” of him not to compliment her on the lipstick she applied before she visits his office hours (Jackson 100), and slowly realizes that he is much more romantically interested in the older, more outgoing, and more self-confident students Anne and Vicki than he is in Natalie. As Natalie becomes more involved in Langdon’s life, she befriends his wife Elizabeth, a former student of his that, according to Hattenhauer, functions as Natalie’s double in a similar way to how Natalie’s father and Langdon are doubled (105). In the same way that Tony represents what Natalie aspires to be when she appears later in the novel, Elizabeth— self-destructive, lonely, an object of mockery for the people around her— is a representation of what Natalie fears becoming. Parodying Elizabeth, Vicki says, “No one understands that I only want everyone to love me” (Jackson 120); without realizing it, she also describes Natalie’s desire for others to view her as superior. Natalie’s interactions with the Langdons, Anne and Vicki— who repeatedly ignore her, trivialize her writing, and make her feel “more gaunt and ungraceful than ever” (Jackson 122)— lead her to realize that the people around her do not see her as the powerful, intelligent figure she imagines herself to be. Natalie has latched onto this feeling of superiority in absence of a fully-formed identity, and questioning it leads her to question reality as well. Her internal conflict at this stage is best summarized by the following quote:
Perhaps, and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her— suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else? (Jackson 150).
Descent into Unreality
It is roughly at this point in the novel that the figure of Tony emerges. She is initially mentioned in one of Natalie’s letters to her father as “a very strange character… [who] is always off by herself somewhere”; Natalie expresses a desire to meet her, then comments that “now I have mentioned that I would like to meet the girl Tony, I will certainly meet her soon. I have discovered that all you have to do is to notice a thing like that concretely enough to say it… for it to happen” (Jackson 138). This belief that she is able to manifest events by simply speaking about them is a sign of Natalie’s increasing delusional beliefs, as well as an example of the “incorrect folk intuition” that characterizes childrens’ reasoning in Piaget’s preoperational stage (Sapolsky 176). Nevertheless, Natalie’s prophecy comes true; her first encounter with Tony comes only a page after this first mention. The encounter itself reveals a number of things about the role Tony is to play in Natalie’s development. Natalie is awoken in the middle of the night by an unidentified voice whispering in her ear; this mysterious, seemingly disembodied voice leads Natalie around the dormitory, promising to introduce Natalie to a “little girl” who will show her “lovely little animals” and “the most beautiful pictures” (Jackson 140-141). This search yields nothing, and ultimately results in Natalie, abandoned by her guide, stumbling outside in her pajamas. At this point, the guide reappears and is finally identified as Tony.
It is eventually revealed, near the novel’s end, that Tony is not a real person; rather, she is an imagined or hallucinated figure that only Natalie can see. From a perspective of developmental psychology, then, she can be cast in the role of an imaginary friend. In a 2017 study by Karen Majors and Ed Baines, it was found that imaginary friends can serve a variety of purposes for a developing child, including “to provide comfort and support,” “to escape reality,” “to overcome loneliness,” “to fulfill wishes,” and to serve as a manifestation of “the child’s ideal self” (44). Throughout the novel, Tony plays all of these roles for Natalie. Her reassurances to Natalie that she “needn’t think [she’s] the only one” (Jackson 140) recall Natalie’s earlier wish for “a person… who is thinking about me and who watches me and knows everything I think about” (Jackson 108), and her promises to show Natalie fantastical things offer an escape from the mundane reality that Natalie dreads. Perhaps most importantly, Tony personifies the concept of the “essential self” (Jackson 29) that Natalie has striven to find since the novel’s very beginning. Tony is someone “who doesn’t care whether she sits on the steps of people who don’t invite her” (Jackson 148); in other words, she is utterly free, self-assured, and has no regard for what others think of her. Natalie’s fantasies of godlike power persist— in one scene, she imagines being a giant and eating the doll-sized people at the college alive (Jackson 173-175)— but Tony is able to speak her own power fantasies aloud; “someday I shall be allowed to torture [the other students],” she tells Natalie, “I believe I shall take them one by one and peel them like apples” (Jackson 179). According to Darryl Hattenhauer, Natalie “wants Tony’s power, yet cannot integrate it” (108); this aspirational fascination draws her further into her own interior world.
Departure from the Familiar
Natalie’s dissociation from reality reaches its climax about nine-tenths of the way into the novel, when she and Tony leave campus early in the morning one day and explore the surrounding small town together. For Natalie, this is her first step into the kind of freedom that Tony is emblematic of; she is excited to have “a world ahead of [her] and no one to know at any time where [she is]” (Jackson 182). Egged on by Tony, she indulges in elaborate fantasies and seems, at times, to even believe them. An important marker of Natalie’s regression is that she wonders if the college has “faded away or blown into dust… just because [she and Tony] have gone” (Jackson 185). This indicates a lack of object permanence— the “understanding that even if [a child] can’t see an object, it still exists” (Sapolsky 176)— which is a criterion of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage of development. Natalie’s belief that where she is located at any given moment is “the only immediate spot there is” (Jackson 185) is only one example of her increasing inability to think logically and distinguish fantasy from reality. She imagines the items in a drugstore to be magical talismans (Jackson 186), and fantasizes with Tony about Elizabeth Langdon coming to meet them, bringing “jewels,” “papers,” and “guns” (Jackson 195). An important episode during this period is Natalie and Tony’s encounter with a one-armed man in a restaurant; he is the only person to directly acknowledge Tony, suggesting that he, too, is a figment of Natalie’s imagination.
Realization of Danger and Defeat of the Enemy
Natalie and Tony’s day in town is, for the most part, idyllic and uninterrupted by real-world concerns, but this peaceful state of affairs is unsustainable. Both are shaken by their meeting with the one-armed man, and it is here that Natalie and Tony— up to this point, indistinguishable from each other in almost every way— begin to diverge. While Natalie has grown tired and observes that her and Tony’s fantasies feel “somehow not the same” (Jackson 198), Tony’s disdain for the real world and the people that inhabit it has strengthened. “They want to pull us back, and start us all over again just like them,” she tells Natalie, “doing the things they want to do and acting the way they want to act,” but tempers this fearmongering with the tantalizing promise that she can bring Natalie to “a place where… no one can trouble us” (Jackson 199). Natalie agrees to go with her, but it is clear that this agreement comes from fear and a desire to be seen as worthy in Tony’s eyes rather than Natalie’s own will. Natalie soon comes to regret this choice when Tony leads her onto a bus and promptly disappears into the crowd, abandoning her. Natalie sees the other passengers on the bus as mere “automatons” playing a bit part in “the great dance which was seen close up as the destruction of Natalie, and, far off, as the end of the world” (Jackson 201). Her ego boundaries have completely evaporated; she has inflated the interior drama of her search for an identity into something of apocalyptic proportions. When the bus finally empties and Tony reappears, her responses to Natalie become more cryptic and threatening. She suggests that there are new “antagonists'' awaiting Natalie in the near future, and hints at her own nature when she tells Natalie that if “you invent someone smart enough to destroy your enemies, you invent them so smart you’ve got a new enemy” (Jackson 205). Natalie and Tony finally disembark from the bus at an abandoned amusement park on a lake far away from the point at which they began. They have finally left the realm of reality behind, and Tony has gained a new power and dominance because of it.
Natalie’s reluctance and fear only increases as Tony leads her forward into the dark unknown, but Tony continues to ply her with promises of “heaven” and far-off places like “Paris… or Siam” (Jackson 207). As Tony delves deeper and deeper into the realm of fantasy, telling Natalie that they could travel to dozens of fantastical locales ranging from “a city where no one is alive but us” to “a palace of blue marble with fountains that flow with purple wine” (Jackson 208-209), Natalie withdraws back into reality. When Tony speaks of “[stamping] on the ground” and calling down anything she wants out of thin air, Natalie sardonically responds, “Not in this mud you couldn’t stamp” (Jackson 208). Slowly but surely, Natalie is beginning to realize that the complete freedom from reality that Tony represents is childish and unrealistic, and to grow up, she will need to leave the part of her that is Tony behind.
As Natalie continues to awake from her fantasy, Tony becomes less corporeal. She disappears and reappears as she leads Natalie deeper into the woods surrounding the lake, at times even reduced to “a voice dying away” (Jackson 210). Natalie begins to look at the situation logically; instead of obeying “the sacred rules of magic” as she once would have (Jackson 109), she tells herself that “people are only afraid of other people” and that there is nothing menacing about Tony’s “schoolgirl joke” (Jackson 211). However, the definitive turning point comes when Natalie finally comes to a clearing and Tony reappears, denying that she ever left and forcing Natalie to stay until some undefined event happens. The whole scene— down to the remote setting, among the trees at nighttime— parallels Natalie’s assault at the beginning of the novel, which she has denied throughout the entire story up to this point. Tony embraces her, and Natalie thinks, horrified, “she wants me” (Jackson 214), reminiscent of her reaction to the earlier assault— “is he going to touch me?” (Jackson 43). Hattenhauer writes that “Tony has become a seducer, a demon lover” (110); when Natalie rejects her offer to withdraw permanently from reality, she evolves into an avatar of Natalie’s deeply buried trauma. But now, Natalie recognizes what she is faced with; she tells Tony “I will not… I am not afraid of you,” simultaneously fending her off and coming to terms with her previous assault (Jackson 214). Natalie then begins walking back in the direction of the town. She calls for Tony to come with her, but there is no answer. Natalie has finally grown up, “defeated her own enemy… and… would never be required to fight again,” but her departure from childhood is, unsurprisingly, bittersweet; “What did I do wrong?” she wonders (Jackson 215).
Conclusion
Even though Natalie has grown tremendously by the novel’s end, it is clear that she still has many struggles yet to face. It is likely that she will need to reckon further with the trauma caused by her sexual assault and by her maladjusted relationship with her family, and it will be difficult to form healthy relationships with her peers after spending months in a self-imposed state of isolation. She must also cope with the sadness of losing Tony, who, despite her unreality and toxicity, was, for a time, Natalie’s only friend. The uncertainty of Natalie’s future is made apparent by the novel’s ending incident; after hitchhiking back into town, she finds herself standing on the edge of a bridge, contemplating suicide, but is interrupted when a passerby jokingly asks if she is “going swimming” (Jackson 218). Natalie suspects that this stranger, who is gone before she can get a good look at him, is the one-armed man that she and Tony met earlier. Jackson’s second inclusion of this figure suggests that even though Natalie has matured, she has not completely left the wonder of childhood behind; even though Tony is gone, a small part of her lives on inside. As Natalie returns to the college, she notes that none of the people in the town are paying particular attention to her, and is comforted by this knowledge, indicating that her egocentrism has finally faded. Because of this, it is easy to believe the novel’s final line: “as [Natalie] had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (Jackson 218).
Works Cited
Hattenhauer, Darryl. “Hangsaman.” Shirley Jackson's American Gothic, State University of New York Press, 2003, pp. 99–118.
Jackson, Shirley. Hangsaman. Penguin Books, 2013.
Majors, Karen, and Ed Baines. “Children’s Play with Their Imaginary Companions: Parent Experiences and Perceptions of the Characteristics of the Imaginary Companions and Purposes Served.” Educational & Child Psychology, vol. 34, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2017, pp. 37–56.
Sapolsky, Robert M. “Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb.” Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and at Our Worst, Penguin, 2018, pp. 174–222.
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Katie Bonevento is a second-year English major at the University of Florida. She is the lead coordinator of this year’s Undergraduate English Conference and the secretary of University Film Society. Her primary research interest is the role of women in Gothic and horror literature and film. Today, she is presenting on Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, through the lens of developmental psychology.
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