nonconformity.
A novel that Jackson read during her years at Rochester offers a clue towhat she might have meant. The Well of Loneliness , by the British author Radclyffe Hall, was published in 1928 and quickly became notorious as the subject of an obscenity trial in England. The novel’s protagonist is a girl named Stephen, the daughter of parents who had longed for a son. Even as a child, she identifies strongly as a boy, wearing masculine clothes and cutting her hair short. By age seven, she begins to develop crushes on women and is continually disappointed when the objects of her affection prove more interested in men. But sexuality in the novel is expressed only obliquely. What is most palpable is Stephen’s sense of herself as an outsider—a person who cannot conform to social or parental expectations and finds herself punished as a result. Jackson—a girl who often felt awkward in her own body, whose mother pressured her to dress in a way she found unappealing, who romanticized outlaw figures such as Villon—must have deeply sympathized.
And it is crucial to remember that Tony is not a real character: she is a creation of Natalie’s fragmented psyche. In an unpublished document written around 1960, while she was working on We Have Always Lived in the Castle , Jackson noted her chagrin to discover herself mentioned in a book of literary criticism about “sex variant women in literature,” which, she said, described Hangsaman as “an ‘eerie’ novel about lesbians.” “i happen to know what hangsaman is about. i wrote it,” Jackson retorted. She admits to having wanted to create a “sense of illicit excitement,” presumably with the suggestion of a sexual charge between Tony and Natalie. But she asserts that Tony is “not a he or a she but the demon in the mind, and that demon finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad with laughing when it triumphs; it is the demon which is fear and we are afraid of words. we are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize.”
The demon in the mind . This was Jackson’s obsession, perhaps her fundamental obsession, throughout her life. Often it appears metaphorically as the source of the evil deeds people commit against one another, as in her story “The Lottery”: what else can explain the villagers’ mad adherence to a tradition that requires them to murder one oftheir neighbors? But it takes literal forms as well. In the early stories that would be assembled in the Lottery collection, innocent young women encounter an eerily seductive figure named James Harris (modeled on the character in the Child Ballad), who at first appears to be an ordinary person—a boyfriend or a colleague—but sneakily, through a sinister trick of the mind, induces in them a kind of madness. In early drafts of Hangsaman , too, the demon is literal: Natalie is visited by a figure she calls Asmodeus, a Hebrew name for the king of demons. “there was a devil who dwelt with natalie; she was seventeen, and the devil had been with her since she had been about twelve,” one of the early drafts begins. “his was the first voice to greet her in the morning, and at night he slept under her pillow. . . . all day he rode on her shoulder, unseen by her mother, and he whispered in her ear.” Asmodeus is an evil alter ego, whispering snide quips about Natalie’s parents and urging her to yield her soul to him. In later drafts the literal demon disappears from the novel and the figure of the detective takes over as Natalie’s inquisitor, plumbing the depths of her guilty heart.
The demon in the mind, Jackson wrote, exploits one’s bad conscience, spinning ordinary worries and grievances into destructive obsession. It is striking that the sources of fear she was still writing about nearly
A novel that Jackson read during her years at Rochester offers a clue towhat she might have meant. The Well of Loneliness , by the British author Radclyffe Hall, was published in 1928 and quickly became notorious as the subject of an obscenity trial in England. The novel’s protagonist is a girl named Stephen, the daughter of parents who had longed for a son. Even as a child, she identifies strongly as a boy, wearing masculine clothes and cutting her hair short. By age seven, she begins to develop crushes on women and is continually disappointed when the objects of her affection prove more interested in men. But sexuality in the novel is expressed only obliquely. What is most palpable is Stephen’s sense of herself as an outsider—a person who cannot conform to social or parental expectations and finds herself punished as a result. Jackson—a girl who often felt awkward in her own body, whose mother pressured her to dress in a way she found unappealing, who romanticized outlaw figures such as Villon—must have deeply sympathized.
And it is crucial to remember that Tony is not a real character: she is a creation of Natalie’s fragmented psyche. In an unpublished document written around 1960, while she was working on We Have Always Lived in the Castle , Jackson noted her chagrin to discover herself mentioned in a book of literary criticism about “sex variant women in literature,” which, she said, described Hangsaman as “an ‘eerie’ novel about lesbians.” “i happen to know what hangsaman is about. i wrote it,” Jackson retorted. She admits to having wanted to create a “sense of illicit excitement,” presumably with the suggestion of a sexual charge between Tony and Natalie. But she asserts that Tony is “not a he or a she but the demon in the mind, and that demon finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad with laughing when it triumphs; it is the demon which is fear and we are afraid of words. we are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize.”
The demon in the mind . This was Jackson’s obsession, perhaps her fundamental obsession, throughout her life. Often it appears metaphorically as the source of the evil deeds people commit against one another, as in her story “The Lottery”: what else can explain the villagers’ mad adherence to a tradition that requires them to murder one oftheir neighbors? But it takes literal forms as well. In the early stories that would be assembled in the Lottery collection, innocent young women encounter an eerily seductive figure named James Harris (modeled on the character in the Child Ballad), who at first appears to be an ordinary person—a boyfriend or a colleague—but sneakily, through a sinister trick of the mind, induces in them a kind of madness. In early drafts of Hangsaman , too, the demon is literal: Natalie is visited by a figure she calls Asmodeus, a Hebrew name for the king of demons. “there was a devil who dwelt with natalie; she was seventeen, and the devil had been with her since she had been about twelve,” one of the early drafts begins. “his was the first voice to greet her in the morning, and at night he slept under her pillow. . . . all day he rode on her shoulder, unseen by her mother, and he whispered in her ear.” Asmodeus is an evil alter ego, whispering snide quips about Natalie’s parents and urging her to yield her soul to him. In later drafts the literal demon disappears from the novel and the figure of the detective takes over as Natalie’s inquisitor, plumbing the depths of her guilty heart.
The demon in the mind, Jackson wrote, exploits one’s bad conscience, spinning ordinary worries and grievances into destructive obsession. It is striking that the sources of fear she was still writing about nearly
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