Yes! Aunt Morgen and Elizabeth and Doctor Wright all start off as such kind of flat characters (Elizabeth especially), and it would be so easy to make Morgen into the Evil Guardian, but they're real people, albeit deeply flawed. The worst thing Morgan threatens her niece with is institutionalizing her, but I felt like she would never actually do it. And the way she and Betsy joke around is great, although of course Betsy is completely untrustworthy. ("I bet you never dreamed I could do Beth so well," it's a combination of AHAHAHA and AUGH.) Whereas in Hangsaman (which I really do love), most of the other girls are flat, the father/teacher figures are inappropriate and weird, Natalie's mother is crushed and Elizabeth (that name again) seems well on her way.
Let's be real: within months/weeks/days of the end of Hangsaman, Natalie probably goes into a nervous collapse. She's just lost her one friend in all the world who AT BEST abandoned her in the middle of a forest, AT WORST was plotting against her all along, and (possibly even worse than that?) might have been a hallucination.
YEAH, plus she still has to go back to that awful college and her screwy family. I read an analysis in I think the recent bio? that said Jackson was following an old pattern, maybe out of Frazier -- the hero has to go down to the underworld, be severely tested, and then goes through a rebirth ritual which leaves them with a boon or new strength. Aeneas is a pretty classic (heh) example, I think. In Natalie's case, it's also tied to entering society as a mature adult ("she was alone, and grown-up, and powerful"): her paranoid, alienated adolescent self essentially dies, and she is welcomed back into society by the guardian figures of the older couple in the car, who are literally like the reverse of Charon, ferrying her back to the world.
Buuut, of course that clashes completely with the highly realistic and penetrating psychological and social realism of the rest of the book. Jackson is always at her terrifying best mixing up natural and supernatural, the mundane and otherworldly, but having Natalie's triumph be so unambiguous is not that characteristic. (All the other "victories" of heroines at the ends of her novels -- even the one in the Bird's Nest -- seem much more double-sided and dangerous.)
I will say that one story Jackson wrote with the same structure, of the nightmare journey down and a ritual rebirth back up, is ABSOLUTELY convincing and freaky -- "The Tooth," in The Lottery, about a housewife who goes into town to get a tooth pulled and winds up losing her entire identity instead. It's done step by step and is absolutely convincing and terrifying.
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Let's be real: within months/weeks/days of the end of Hangsaman, Natalie probably goes into a nervous collapse. She's just lost her one friend in all the world who AT BEST abandoned her in the middle of a forest, AT WORST was plotting against her all along, and (possibly even worse than that?) might have been a hallucination.
YEAH, plus she still has to go back to that awful college and her screwy family. I read an analysis in I think the recent bio? that said Jackson was following an old pattern, maybe out of Frazier -- the hero has to go down to the underworld, be severely tested, and then goes through a rebirth ritual which leaves them with a boon or new strength. Aeneas is a pretty classic (heh) example, I think. In Natalie's case, it's also tied to entering society as a mature adult ("she was alone, and grown-up, and powerful"): her paranoid, alienated adolescent self essentially dies, and she is welcomed back into society by the guardian figures of the older couple in the car, who are literally like the reverse of Charon, ferrying her back to the world.
Buuut, of course that clashes completely with the highly realistic and penetrating psychological and social realism of the rest of the book. Jackson is always at her terrifying best mixing up natural and supernatural, the mundane and otherworldly, but having Natalie's triumph be so unambiguous is not that characteristic. (All the other "victories" of heroines at the ends of her novels -- even the one in the Bird's Nest -- seem much more double-sided and dangerous.)
I will say that one story Jackson wrote with the same structure, of the nightmare journey down and a ritual rebirth back up, is ABSOLUTELY convincing and freaky -- "The Tooth," in The Lottery, about a housewife who goes into town to get a tooth pulled and winds up losing her entire identity instead. It's done step by step and is absolutely convincing and terrifying.