“Imagining Differently”: Tales of Tarot and the Fantastic in Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman

Abstract

The essay discusses the role of the Tarot and the fantastic in Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman (1951). As a female writer in mid-century America, Jackson uses elements of mysticism and fantasy genre as a means of interrogating the social order and gender politics of her times, but also to undermine the official patriarchal discourse and open new spaces of female experience. By blurring the boundaries between external and internal worlds, and by employing elements of the occult, the author shows reality and reason as arbitrary constructs and draws attention to other ways of meaning making. In contrast to the formal discourse and traditional science, Tarot images and its complex symbolism foreground “women’s ways of knowing” and offer an alternative feminine language beyond official systems of communication.