Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson and the Madness of Mid-Century Womanhood

Jackson’s biographer on the author’s fragmented female characters — and her critical renaissance

https://www.guernicamag.com/ruth-franklin-the-madness-of-mid-century-womanhood/



Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson’s murky and disquieting 1951 novel, is a frantic read. It careens down unlit dormitory corridors and bounds around the psyche of its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Natalie Waite, as she arrives at college and plummets into psychological collapse. “Suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny,” Natalie wonders, her mental splintering already underway, “suppose she were someone else?” Soon, she develops an intimate friendship with a girl in her dorm named Tony — who, it turns out, Natalie has invented.

Jackson’s novel is hazy, filtered as it is through Natalie, and uneven in places. Tony slips in slowly, like toxic gas, only to disappear abruptly, leaving questions about Natalie’s mental state unanswered. But about the gendered nature of Natalie’s unravelling, Hangsaman is unambiguous: Natalie is at least partially undone by a sexual assault that occurs early in the novel, at her childhood home; more broadly, she is the product of an upper-middle-class 1950s America that does not care about resolving or supporting her personhood. The other women in her world include a faculty wife who, feeling her selfhood subsumed by her marriage, lives in alcoholic misery, and Natalie’s own mother, who throws elaborate garden parties in the suburbs and divulges, “it isn’t any single thing…it’s just that…this is the only life I’ve got…this is all.”

Hangsaman is, in this respect, an early effort at what would become a career endeavour for Jackson: to explore the fragmentary internal landscape of her generation of women, often through themes of madness, fracturing, and disorientation. Jackson herself was a mother of four, and married to literary critic Stanley Hyman; while her love for her children and her Bennington home life permeates her writing (including in the autobiographical Life Among the Savages), she struggled to balance the demands of mid-century womanhood with her desire to produce serious literary works. Natalie is one manifestation of this tension.

“Her body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era,” writes biographer Ruth Franklin in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. “The stories she tells form a powerful counternarrative to the ‘feminine mystique,’ revealing the unhappiness and instability beneath the housewife’s sleek veneer of competence.” (In fact, Natalie Waite’s unravelling predated Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique by a dozen years.) Seventy years after its initial publication, Hangsaman’s prescience makes it worth revisiting. It also provides a sketchy roadmap of where Jackson would head later — the unsettling, female-cantered psychological novels that were her late masterpieces.

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