Hangsaman Essay

“One in one and all alone and evermore will be so”

In Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson explores how Growing up is a part of life. As a person grows older, they finds find out who they really are. Jackson informs readers about us what it is like to be a seventeen year old. She describes to readers what Natalie Waite goes through as she develops an adult consciousness, and, at the same time, becomes aware that the development process of growing up can be pleasurable, but also painful. As Natalie Waite leaved for college, she begins to fall into a deep depression and she starts imagining the world she lives in. In Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson explores the theme of growing up and argues that growing up isn’t always what it seems like.
Shirley Jackson was born on December 14, 1916 in San Francisco. As a teenager, she wrote short stories and poems. She went to the University of Rochester, but after a year of attending the college, she dropped out and spent her time practicing writing at home. A year later, Shirley Jackson entered Syracuse University; there, she published her first book “Janice”. She later won a poetry contest at Syracuse. Shortly after, she married Stanley Edgar Hyman. They were both the founders of a literary magazine called “Spectre”. In 1940, they both graduated and moved to New York. They had four children. Shirley Jackson’s story “Come Dance With Me in Ireland” was chosen for Best American Short Stories in 1944. In 1948 Times New Yorker published her most famous short story called “The Lottery”. In 1951, she published “Hangsaman” which began her series of gothic short stories. In 1951, Shirley Jackson and her husband moved to Northern Bennington, where they remained the rest of their lives. Shirley Jackson continued writing short stories. One, of which is her best-known novel, “The Haunting of Hill House”. Shirley Jackson died on August 8, 1965 in Northern Bennington.
Natalie Waite, a seventeen-year-old freshman in college is the heroine in Hangsaman. There are moments in the story where Natalie sounds mad, and others where she sounds normal and happy. Natalie is lonely at school and because of who she is, and because of what type of novel this is her loneliness is terrifying. College is nothing as what she imagined it to be. As one critic explains, Natalie begins to have feelings of “isolation” and “alienation” during her first few months away at college (Carpenter, 216).
“ Strange Natalie thought, in all his wisdom my father never found from my letters that I get along badly with people: I suppose it’s the first thing my mother fears, just as she is afraid that I have been visited with all her sorrows, because those she is better able to heal in me than she could in herself. It seemed that perhaps her father was trying to cure his failures in Natalie, and her mother was perhaps trying to avoid, through Natalie, doing over again those things she now believed to have been mistaken” (Jackson, 163-64).

Natalie feels as if her dad is trying to create her in his own image, and her mom has escaped from her controlling dad by turning to alcohol, so she’s no help to Natalie in her time of need. Out of hopelessness and loneliness Natalie turns deep into herself and her fantasy life. Throughout the book she’s being questioned by an imaginary detective regarding a murder that she is being accused of. She soon meets a girl named Tony, who is imaginary, and she ends up falling in love with her. She follows Tony to a place deep in the woods where she loses herself and comes close to suicide. Natalie later realizes that she doesn’t like being there anymore and she leaves, emerging back to reality. Natalie does however find who she is and makes the transition from a teenager to adulthood. Natalie’s dad had an impact on Natalie’s behavior. Even after she leaves home he continues to control her and her actions. Her dad is a self- important writer. He gives Natalie help with her writing by creating assignments for her. Her dad verbally abuses her mother in many ways. Every Sunday, he forces his wife to host parties for his friends. He soon drives Natalie’s mom crazy leading her to become an alcoholic. She turns to alcohol because her husband is controlling. He’s controlling, arrogant, and selfish. He never really cares about how Natalie feels, or how anyone really feels. Natalie felt like she cannot talk to her dad because she is afraid about what he would say, or do, to her. Natalie and her dad send each other letters. One day Natalia was tired of having to pretend that everything was okay but could not figure out how to tell him how she truly felt. “Daddy dear, I am a failure, I hate college and I hate everybody” (Jackson, 172). She could not tell him that she didn’t have friends, or that she hated college, that she wanted to come back home, or even about Tony. “ I guess moms and dads never do know what the kids are doing really” (Jackson, 229). The fact that Natalie couldn’t talk to her mom or dad about her problems forces her to retreat deep into herself. Natalie makes a strange new friend towards the end of the book. Natalie sees Tony as an “exotic, clever, intelligent, and self posed” (Parks, 219). Tony was the self-image of who Natalie wanted to be. The fact that she was whom Natalie dreamed of becoming was the reason Natalie fell so in love with Tony. Tony tells Natalie that she is her enemy. Tony is the queen of the world that Natalie has imagined, the world that has caused Natalie to drift so far way from reality. Tony takes Natalie to a place in the woods so far out that Natalie feels lost. “Tony, I’m afraid of this place, please lets go back” (Jackson, 226). Natalie did not like where she was at all. Tony seemed to enjoy it, she felt free, and powerful. One day Natalie tells Tony that she wishes she could invent someone so smart that they destroy all enemies. Tony’s response to her was “so you invent someone smart enough to destroy your enemies, you invent them so smart you’ve got a new enemy” (Jackson. 216). Natalie was disturbed by her response and it makes her think about things more. The central theme of the book is about growing up and the consequences that come with it. As people grow older they tend to understand themselves more and the world around them. For some growing up is more painful then pleasurable. For Natalie Waite, finding who she really is, is a challenge. She cannot wait for the day she will move out of her house and go off to college. She dislikes being at home because she feels like no one understands her. Once she goes to college she soon realizes that college life is not as great as she expected it to be. Though she tries to make friends no one really cares to be around her. She soon falls for her teacher who is married and she continues to have a crush on him throughout the book. Little by little, Natalie diminishes from reality. She has an imaginary girlfriend in wish she runs away with to the woods. Natalie later on realizes that if she doesn’t leave Tony, she is going to lose herself completely. “Her feet again upon the road, with the roller coaster- so soon to be revived for Summer traffic- ahead of her, she thought theatrically, I will never see Tony any more; She is gone, and knew that, theatrical or not, it was true” (Jackson, 228). She figures out that Tony is her enemy. She left Tony in the woods even after Tony begs for her to stay. “She had defeated her own enemy, she thought, and she would never be required to fight again, and she put her feet down tiredly in the mud and thought, what did I do wrong” (Jackson, 228). Natalie was proud to have left Tony because she realized that the cause of her pain was Tony. As one critic points out “Natalie does however make the frightful transition from innocence of a sort, to experience, to the beginning of adult life” (Parks, 219). Growing up is an adventure, sometimes even a roller coaster for some. In Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson explores how difficult it is for a teenager to grow up in the modern world. This book is full of surprises. Shirley Jackson describes how the mind reacts to, adjusts, embraces, or recoils from experiences. She reminds readers what it is like to be a seventeen-year-old girl again by exploring the theme of growing up and argues that its not all what seems to be.