Initiation

In Hangsaman, what quickly follows this moment of trauma in the woods signifies that a new narrative mode will actively emerge out of Natalie’s disunified psyche and language. The morning after the assault, Natalie lingers in the lacuna of the night before, inhabiting and recognizing it but also insisting on its narrative meaninglessness, reassuring herself: “I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened” (43). Curiously, these self-reassurances, which occur the next morning, or, self-denials, reproduce the same Gothic repetition[10] that Hangsaman has not necessarily aligned directly with thus far in the plot, only, prior to this moment, happening in bits and bursts rather than more strictly following Gothic convention the way that, for example, The Haunting of Hill House does. As theorized by Michelle Massé, repetition can arguably be understood as an archetypal device of most Gothic texts, and is often pathologized in Freudian terms, particularly due to the genre’s concerns with a distorted, maligned and malignant femininity, but, as Massé argues, we may be able to reconceptualize this repetition as a grasping at “feminine” agency: “The [Gothic] reactivation of trauma is an attempt to recognize, not relish, the incredible and unspeakable that nonetheless happened.”[11] This repetition, of “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened” builds upon itself, syntactically: she begins with “I don’t remember,” follows it with “Nothing happened,” but smashes, or stitches, these comma-separated fragments together in a way so accumulative and obvious that we can see the seams of the corpse as it is re-stitched, “Nothing I remember happened.” The active process of restitching the experience and narrative of trauma, then, is made explicit to us, undeniable. Here, Natalie engages in the same unstitching and restitching that the monster does in “Patchwork Girl,” in, specifically, “seamed adhesive,” in which we come to understand that "Being seam'd with scars was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition.”

_{[10] Michelle Massé, “Gothic Repetition,”Signs, vol. 15, 1990, pp.
679-709.

[11] Massé, “Gothic Repetition,” 681-682.}