Thread

This quality of “seam’dness” with “scars” continues to haunt Hangsaman as the text progresses. Late in the novel, Natalie, at college and increasingly unraveling, begins to infiltrate the third-person narrative, her perception dismantling the world around her in a double-edged act of dissociation and violent, cathartic, fantasized agency:

Perhaps tomorrow I shall pick up one of the houses, any one, and, holding it gently in one hand, pull it carefully apart with my other hand, with great delicacy taking the pieces of it off one after another: first the door and then, dislodging the slight nails with care, the right front corner of the house, board by board, and then, sweeping out the furniture inside, down the right wall of the house, removing it with care and not touching the second floor, which should remain intact even after the first floor is entirely gone. Then the stairs, step by step, and all this while the mannikins inside run screaming from each section of the house to a higher and a more concealed room, crushing one another and stumbling and pulling frantically, slamming doors behind them while my strong fingers pull each door softly off its hinges and pull the walls apart and lift out the windows intact and take out carefully the tiny beds and chairs; and finally they will be all together like seeds in a pomegranate. (173)

This moment expresses a tenuousness in Natalie’s ability to vocalize her own anger. Crucially, this scene follows another encounter with her professor Arthur Langdon and his wife, a former student of his; he is known to prey upon his students, even still, and has been undoubtedly grooming Natalie since she arrived at the school. Natalie walks around the campus late at night, and the narratology begins to come apart at the seams in dramatic ways, offering her a route to sudden power: “I shall pick up one of the houses, any one, and, holding it gently in one hand, pull it carefully apart with my other hand, with great delicacy taking the pieces of it off one after another.” Natalie is present here in the I, but this I is a fantastical, dreamt, and severed one, at once attached to her but still disjointed; Natalie herself cannot “pick up one of the houses” and “hold it gently” in her hands. Her rage, and the violent urge to alter the shape of her reality, can only arrive via this dissociated method. This juxtaposition, of a destructive and all-powerful self, with the interiority of this expression, renders Natalie monstrous. Borrowing from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s foundational work on monster theory, we might partially define monstrosity, as is embodied in Natalie, as that which is “ontologically liminal.”[1]She is “ontologically liminal” in that she cannot locate herself, is clearly struggling to invent a girl-self that must exist between the real and the unreal, between the “I” and the imagined persona. The houses she wishes to break belong to professors and their wives, and she, at a women’s college with all male professors, inhabits a strictly-sanctioned role here. Her desire to refuse and desecrate this role is only internally expressed here, but it is expressed nonetheless—and the grasp at narrative power appears similar to the monster’s unwieldy self-invention in Patchwork Girl. The effect of this dissociated focalization might not only be dismemberment of a negative or unfeeling quality, but also, simultaneously, a generative, agency-giving one.

_{[12] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture:
Seven Theses,” Monster Culture, 1996.}