Girl-Narratology
The narratological elements of Hangsaman work towards a dissociated, layered and multi-vocal structuring of Natalie’s
subjectivity, and, further, portrays girlhood as an experience that constantly,
consciously mediates, unstitches, and restitches its own narrative structure.
The novel uses what I call dissociated focalization to depict the markings of patriarchal trauma on narration and girl-selfhood. I use “dissociation” to refer to both its definition within trauma theory and as a narrative device.
Dissociation can, for the purposes this essay, be defined as the breakage or disconnection that occurs between a person and their immediate experience and ability to perceive and feel its sensations, or to register the reality of it, usually when experiencing trauma. As defined by psychoanalyst and scholar Paul M. Gedo, dissociation fundamentally “disrupts the person’s sense of internal coherence. It interrupts internal narratives as well as the person’s ability to convey his or her experience to another via discursive language.”[1]
Simplified, focalization can be understood according to narratologist Mieke Bal’s definition: “Focalization is the relationship between the ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen.”[2] The narrator of a text, then, is not necessarily always the focalizing agent, for Bal and others—and, in Natalie’s case, the distinction frequently and volatilely blurs, moving between a series of third-person narration, free indirect discourse, I-statements, and into an almost reflexive ventriloquism. Within the first few pages of the novel, we glean a sense of this effect in a slightly jarring way: in the middle of an otherwise mundane conversation at the breakfast table with her parents, the straightforward third-person narration shifts from Natalie to something else—or perhaps, another layer of Natalie, exposed at the seams:
Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the
police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her
mother’s voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in
time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?” “I can’t tell,”
Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from
her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him (Jackson,
5)
The picturesque scene, and its relatively standard third-person omniscient narration, fractures, but the strangeness of the fracture is also immediately negotiated and integrated into the narrative so that it feels almost inevitable: “It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Natalie suddenly exists to the reader not as solely herself but as herself and this “secret voice” the police detective, whose presence overlaps with her own as if acknowledging a distinct and unquestionable limb, its syntax matter-of-fact, that “the” conveying a familiarity—“It was the police detective”—but also seems to quietly mutate and project outwards, rendering her mother a ventriloquist, as the “detective” speaks “through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Here, Natalie’s subjectivity, and her narrative grip on it, grow diffuse, multiplied, as does her own mother’s, indicating a link between the construction of femininity and subjectivity more broadly.
(The disjointed form may be read, then, as reflective of experience of female socialization and trauma under patriarchy)
As Susan Lanser writes in “Towards a Feminist Narratology,” “This means, first of all, that the narratives which have provided the foundation for narratology have been either men’s texts or texts treated as men’s texts” (343). I’d amend this argument slightly to say that most of these texts “foundational” to narratology have been constructed and read through a patriarchal, deeply gendered lens, assigning “hysteria” and “unnaturalness” to narratological modes that challenge, disrupt, or undermine normative conceptions of gender and self. Carlton Clark has coined the term “wreader,” a conjoining of “reader” and “writer,” to describe the experience and potential of reading and creating hypertext, and I’d like to enable this type of “wreadership,” engaged and agitated rather than passive or acquiescing.
(My English honors thesis lives conjoined-at-the-hip with this project; the two are co-operating creatures, an amalgamation of critical and creative work and an homage to Shirley Jackson & Shelley Jackson’s uncanny girl-narratologies and all the potential, gleaming monstrosity that lives embedded inside. I aimed to write that essay with a feminist methodology. Click here to read that essay.)
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[1] Mieke Bal, Narratology (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
[2] Paul M. Gedo, “Narrative, Dialogue, and Dissociation,” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 101 (2014): 71-80.
The novel uses what I call dissociated focalization to depict the markings of patriarchal trauma on narration and girl-selfhood. I use “dissociation” to refer to both its definition within trauma theory and as a narrative device.
Dissociation can, for the purposes this essay, be defined as the breakage or disconnection that occurs between a person and their immediate experience and ability to perceive and feel its sensations, or to register the reality of it, usually when experiencing trauma. As defined by psychoanalyst and scholar Paul M. Gedo, dissociation fundamentally “disrupts the person’s sense of internal coherence. It interrupts internal narratives as well as the person’s ability to convey his or her experience to another via discursive language.”[1]
Simplified, focalization can be understood according to narratologist Mieke Bal’s definition: “Focalization is the relationship between the ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen.”[2] The narrator of a text, then, is not necessarily always the focalizing agent, for Bal and others—and, in Natalie’s case, the distinction frequently and volatilely blurs, moving between a series of third-person narration, free indirect discourse, I-statements, and into an almost reflexive ventriloquism. Within the first few pages of the novel, we glean a sense of this effect in a slightly jarring way: in the middle of an otherwise mundane conversation at the breakfast table with her parents, the straightforward third-person narration shifts from Natalie to something else—or perhaps, another layer of Natalie, exposed at the seams:
Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the
police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her
mother’s voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in
time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?” “I can’t tell,”
Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from
her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him (Jackson,
5)
The picturesque scene, and its relatively standard third-person omniscient narration, fractures, but the strangeness of the fracture is also immediately negotiated and integrated into the narrative so that it feels almost inevitable: “It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Natalie suddenly exists to the reader not as solely herself but as herself and this “secret voice” the police detective, whose presence overlaps with her own as if acknowledging a distinct and unquestionable limb, its syntax matter-of-fact, that “the” conveying a familiarity—“It was the police detective”—but also seems to quietly mutate and project outwards, rendering her mother a ventriloquist, as the “detective” speaks “through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Here, Natalie’s subjectivity, and her narrative grip on it, grow diffuse, multiplied, as does her own mother’s, indicating a link between the construction of femininity and subjectivity more broadly.
(The disjointed form may be read, then, as reflective of experience of female socialization and trauma under patriarchy)
As Susan Lanser writes in “Towards a Feminist Narratology,” “This means, first of all, that the narratives which have provided the foundation for narratology have been either men’s texts or texts treated as men’s texts” (343). I’d amend this argument slightly to say that most of these texts “foundational” to narratology have been constructed and read through a patriarchal, deeply gendered lens, assigning “hysteria” and “unnaturalness” to narratological modes that challenge, disrupt, or undermine normative conceptions of gender and self. Carlton Clark has coined the term “wreader,” a conjoining of “reader” and “writer,” to describe the experience and potential of reading and creating hypertext, and I’d like to enable this type of “wreadership,” engaged and agitated rather than passive or acquiescing.
(My English honors thesis lives conjoined-at-the-hip with this project; the two are co-operating creatures, an amalgamation of critical and creative work and an homage to Shirley Jackson & Shelley Jackson’s uncanny girl-narratologies and all the potential, gleaming monstrosity that lives embedded inside. I aimed to write that essay with a feminist methodology. Click here to read that essay.)
[1] Mieke Bal, Narratology (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
[2] Paul M. Gedo, “Narrative, Dialogue, and Dissociation,” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 101 (2014): 71-80.