October 14, 2021
I bought a copy of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at a used book store several months ago. I set it aside to read in the spookiest of months, October. The other book I set aside for this month was a re-read of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I am delighted that both books I designated for my favorite holiday were written by women. I think “horror” or “terror” as genres of art are so often connected with men (Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, John Carpenter, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Hitchcock, Rob Zombie, etc.), yet these two classic works were brought to life by masterful authors who happened to be women. More on Frankenstein to come, but today I just wanted to celebrate my new favorite book (ok maybe a very close second after Pride and Prejudice), The Haunting of Hill House.
The Haunting of Hill House was written by Shirley Jackson in 1959. I plan to write an entire post on Shirley Jackson soon for a series I am planning on “Inspiring Women”, but you may have been exposed to her work in high school – she’s the one who wrote the macabre short story about an annual lottery in a small town, in which a single member of the community would be selected with a random drawing. That story was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, and the magazine received a ton of backlash for publishing such a dark and disturbing story – *spoiler alert* the tale culminated in the brutal stoning and murder of wife and mother, Tessie Hutchinson as she plead with the town to sacrifice anyone but her (and even offers up her own children). As we have found throughout history, the things that get our panties into a wad often turn out to be incredibly cherished and influential as generations pass. The story is now revered as one of the most famous short stories in American literature; so famous that 17-year-old Rebecca was forced to read it in school, and carried it around for the rest of her life.
I am going to be spoiling a bit of the book from here on out, so if you think you’ll ever read it, please go do so and then come back and meet me right here.
The Haunting of Hill House chronicles a young woman named Eleanor Vance as she travels from her home in “the city” to take part in a three-month experiment in a haunted house. When we first meet Eleanor, we learn that she has a dark past with less-than-warm feelings toward her own mother and sister, and a childhood loss of her father. After her father’s death, she experienced paranormal activity when rocks fell from the sky onto her childhood home. Years after hearing of her experience with seemingly supernatural forces, Dr. John Montague has invited her to be his guest in the old, abandoned mansion he has rented for the summer – Hill House. He hopes he and his guests will experience interesting activity and record their impressions in Hill House to provide ample fodder for an upcoming book he is writing about his research in paranormal activity and all things spooky.
Eleanor sets off on her haunted adventure by leaving a haunted past behind. Her attitude toward the trip and the three-month fear-fest she has signed up for is similar to that of a teenager leaving home for the first time for college. At 32-years-old, Eleanor has been a virtual recluse her entire life, spending her adult years taking care of her mother until her death three months prior to Eleanor’s summer vacation in Hill House. This explains her childlike demeanor throughout the book and her overwhelming excitement to accept an invitation that most normal people would have ignored. She spends the entire drive from the city celebrating her new independence and dreaming of the charmed life she will live after the Hill House experiment is over. She dreams of owning a home or apartment with a cat inside, and tiny stone lions on the stoop. When she makes her way to Hill House, nestled in the hills outside of a bleak town called Hillsdale, her happy dreams dissipate as chills run down her spine and she is overwhelmed with the feeling that the house is “vile” and “diseased” and that she should leave at once.
“No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of the house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of the cornice.”
That’s an overwhelming theme of the book – the idea that Hill House itself is alive and menacing. It’s such an interesting take on the haunted house trope. Throughout the book, you find that there are no specific spirits that haunt the house – no apparitions of children, or women carrying umbrellas or ghosts of civil war soldiers that you hear about on ghost tours and on the A&E channel. It’s not about “who” is inhabiting the house, it’s that the house itself is a “who” with an evil persona. Eleanor and the other “guests” have signed themselves up for many nights of entertainment from the enchanted house, and the house has been designed with a perplexing floorplan, and odd angles and passageways to make leaving the house as difficult as possible.
Eleanor is joined at Hill House by a beautiful young woman named Theodora (Theo), Dr. Montague, and a member of the family who owns Hill House, Luke Sanderson. When Eleanor arrives at Hill House and meets Theodora, the two of them become fast friends. When the entire crew is assembled, they all seem to be a merry bunch of misfits with a nonchalant attitude toward the house and the events that will inevitably follow in the dark of night. Eleanor is loving being with this group – at this place where she was invited (wanted), with people who seem to enjoy her company – yet, she immediately begins to fear being left out or ostracized for being different.
On the second night of their stay in Hill House, Eleanor and Theo are startled awake by extreme cold in their rooms accompanied by loud banging sounds that come all the way down the hall and culminate with an intense banging and rattling of Eleanor’s bedroom door, along with giggling sounds. Before Eleanor was startled awake, she had been having a dream about her mother calling for her and awoke to this terrifying moment in Hill House with a feeling of relief that her dream was not her reality. Her reality was absolutely horrible and bone-chilling, but served as a welcomed break from the nightmares of her past. The next morning, Eleanor rises with an overwhelming feeling of happiness – happiness in Hill House. This was the moment in the story that I realized the complexity of Eleanor’s character. She lies to her co-habitants about a life in a little apartment with a white cat, she lies about her age, and pretends to be exactly what Theodora wants her to be in hopes that Theodora will continue to want her. She is hyperaware of what every one thinks about her and often misunderstands the things others say to her and misinterprets sarcasm and humor as slights and judgement. When she feels slighted, she feels intense anger and hatred for her new friends, yet still maintains desperation for approval. Eleanor is an extremely fragile and vulnerable character, not quite fully developed as an adult-person. And all she knows is that she is desperate to be wanted and accepted – which makes her a perfect muse for the persona that is the Hill House.
More creepy things happen and Eleanor is soon singled out by the house. The guests find messages written in chalk and blood that say “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (in case you need your daily example of why punctuation matters), and tensions among the house guests, particularly Theodora and Eleanor begin to develop. Theodora, who has shown herself to be a pursuant of attention at all costs, accuses Eleanor of writing her own name on the wall, and Eleanor begins to panic that her being singled out will separate her from her group of companions. Over time, however, as Eleanor begins to be sucked in by the house, she revels in the fact that the house chose her over all of the others.
Eleanor begins merging with Hill House, and can hear sounds from all over the structure as if the it were her own body. On the last night of Eleanor’s stay, she finds herself happily running through the halls of Hill House, chasing a voice that keeps telling her to follow (a voice that sounds like her mother’s). She bangs on doors, startling the other guests in their sleep. When they rise and begin to search the house for her, she runs to avoid them and ends up in the library where she climbs a rickety, iron stairway. When the others discover her, they are horrified that she has climbed so high on a stairway that seems weak enough to break from her weight. Luke bravely climbs up the stairwell to usher the disoriented Eleanor down safely. When she is safe on the floor of the library, she realizes that she had not been acting entirely of her own volition, and recalls that she ran happily up that staircase with no thought given to the danger of bodily harm.
Naturally, Luke is quite angry that he nearly broke his neck saving her from her own silly choices, and the entire group tells Eleanor the next morning that she must leave Hill House. Eleanor is devastated by this and does not want to leave. Not because she will miss her new friends, but because she belongs with the house. They force her to get in her car and tell her to drive home, but in the end she decides she will never leave the house and “with what she perceives as quick cleverness” puts her foot down on the gas pedal and drives her car head on into a tree in the yard.
This book was extremely scary to me, but I am in love with it. I am in love with Jackson’s masterful development of Eleanor’s character, and the way most people (especially people who have ever had mental health concerns) can identify with Eleanor. She’s an odd person, and not even a particularly “good” person – she lies, she is spiteful, she is selfish. None of the characters in this book are particularly good. Sometimes they are all great, caring companions who take care of each other in adversity. In other moments, they make fun of Eleanor and revel in making her feel like an outcast. Theo and Eleanor get into heated arguments, but in the end, they always find ways to mend the relationship. None of them are perfect, and none of them are perfectly horrible. But at the end, when Eleanor has been taken in by the house and has seemingly gone insane (demonstrated by her flight up the rickety staircase), the reaction among the group ranges from rage and disgust (demonstrated by Luke) to pity (demonstrated by Dr. Montague) to patronization (demonstrated by Theo). Yet they are all in agreement – they know what’s best for Eleanor and she must leave. It’s such an interesting juxtaposition – they can all accept each other when they are being awful and mean by choice, and can still forgive each other and welcome each other with open arms. But when Eleanor is no longer able to make her own rational choices (either due to mental illness or the house’s power over her, or both) she is cast aside with no regard for what she wants or says she needs. In fact, even though they know she is very unwell, they tell her to drive away from Hill House on her own – none of them accompany her to this implied safety of “home” – further reinforcing her need to find home in the evil arms of Hill House. Of course, the end is disastrous and Eleanor never escapes the clutches of Hill House or the haunting inside of her own head. This seems like interesting commentary on mental illness, right on the heels of the lobotomy era.
Eleanor is a person who is looking for a home, and finds one in the form of vile, diseased, Hill House. As the reader, you never learn what makes things go bump in the night at the house, or why the house is haunted to begin with. Was it haunted when it was built? If not, what event in the house’s long history made it so? Are there spirits walking there, or is the house itself an evil spirit? Will Eleanor haunt the house now that she has killed herself on the grounds? Or was it Eleanor herself who was haunted well before she ever entered the gates of Hill House?
Seriously, I have not done this book justice here. I cannot recommend it enough. I wouldn’t read it right before bedtime, unless you are much braver than I (highly likely).
Happy Halloween!
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 