entry/exit wound

Interjection: it is important to recognize that, like Natalie’s own narrative, in Patchwork Girl, of course, the Monster did not choose to come apart, to unstitch. Rather, the conditions of patriarchy and violence produced that dismemberment, that unstitching. Through the experience of ‘female’ trauma, the narrative is itself socialized and traumatized—synonyms, for Jackson’s vision of girlhood—into what, to return to Massé, might be considered the Gothic “nightmare from which the protagonist cannot awaken and whose inexorable logic must be followed.”[13] Natalie is undoubtedly constrained by a patriarchal narratological chokehold, but the chokehold does not originate from her own hands, her own squeezing fingers—indeed, her agitation within its clutches might be the very affect that produces the tendency to read Hangsaman as a hysterical narrative rather than the more imaginative and inventive reading: not “hysterical,” but as monstrous.