Needle, Knife

Hangsaman and Patchwork Girl, I argue, are both deeply experimental texts and, not coincidentally, easily misunderstood ones. Such innovative texts require equally innovative, unconventional analytical readings, and to this end, I suggest a refractive, reparative reading of Hangsaman alongside Patchwork Girl. Specifically, Patchwork Girl can be wielded as an analytical lens through which the narratological complexity, indeed monstrosity, of Hangsaman might be more generously registered and illuminated. When Hangsaman has been approached by a select few scholars, its readings tend to pathologize, and, I argue, reduce the narrative canniness and structural experimentalism of the novel, as well as its representation of girlhood, to what may be called hysterics, diseased and feminine, and thus purposelessly unruly. These readings over-depend on facile diagnosis, labeling the character of Natalie Waite herself as merely “schizophrenic,”[2] mistaking what I argue is a calibrated, experimental narratological strategy for a depiction of individualized character illness. Patchwork Girl, then, provides an oblique method of incision, of reinterpretation against this simplified reading: the hypertext format alongside the monstrous narratological elements explicitly visualize the fragmentation of the perhaps less immediately legible narrative subversion at work in Hangsaman. Patchwork Girl compels the reader to read not against or around its seams but rather through them—and, of course, to consider their very deliberate visibility. An active, agitated reading experience might be more obviously encouraged in the visually dismembered structure of Shelley Jackson’s text, but Hangsaman requires such an engaged reader too, and has long been denied one.

_{[2] Wyatt Bonikowski, “Only One Antagonist’:
the Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson,” Gothic
Studies, no. 2 (2013), p. 69.}