This is by Shirley Jackson (1916-65). It was published in 1959, and I read it as part of Henry Eliot's October read-along. It's nice from time to time to read things as part of a group. The leader provides information and encouragement, and your fellow-readers offer thought-provoking comments. The read-along was timed to end before Hallowe'en, and I did indeed finish it punctually. But there's just been no time to post...

Jackson, whom Dorothy Parker described as the "leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders", published six "dark" novels, and this is one of the most famous. In the course of her life, Jackson grappled with anxiety and agoraphobia, often turning to tranquillizers, amphetamines, and alcohol for relief. She died when she was only 48.


Jackson, aged 24 in 1940

The central character in The Haunting of Hill House is the house itself. It has sat empty for many years, tended by a lugubrious couple who won't spend the night there, and it's associated with a number of tragedies in the past.

To this ominous place, one Dr Montague, keen to gather data on elements of the paranormal, invites three guests, who will effectively act as psychic guinea-pigs: Eleanor (whose point of view is dominant, and whose isolated situation -- her mother died recently, and she's at odds with her sister -- gradually starts to assume more importance in the story); Theodora (a highly intuitive, will-of-the-wisp type of character); and Luke (a distant member of the family Hill House belongs to, who is introduced with the epithets "liar" and "thief").

Jackson's creation was inspired by a building she once saw from a train ("the most hideous building I have ever seen"), and by a building featured in a collection of picture postcards ("ugly... sick, diseased"). In both cases, her visceral dislike turned out to have some basis, as these buildings had both been connected with tragedies. It's an interesting idea: That a house can itself have a personality, and can retain and radiate the unhappiness that has grown between its walls. I must admit I rarely feel this. If anything, I tend to feel a bit sorry for offputting edifices...

Elliot also argues that the actual model for Hill House was Everett Mansion, reputed to be haunted by Edward Hamlin Everett's first wife:



The Haunting of Hill House has an arresting opening, which is mirrored by the paragraph that closes the book: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality... Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within... Silence lay stealthily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

We know it's a bit of a Gothic construction, complete with a tower and an all-encompassing veranda. We also know that it's ever so slightly off in its construction, with odd angles and strange juxtapositions: "The result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole."

And it's not long before it begins to exert itself. It closes doors. It watches. It produces abnormal cold spots. It generates terrifying, poltergeist-like effects. And bit by bit, Hill House starts to absorb Eleanor. Quite early in the story, she reflects: "I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster..., and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside..."

It's all brilliantly done. It's undeniably creepy, definitely goosebumps-raising. But it's never too much, because the pacing is very clever. The tension is built, then relaxed, built again, then relaxed.

And the story treads a masterful line, never definitively elucidated, between ghost story and psychological exploration. What exactly is going on with Eleanor?


Totally benevolent, yet just a little creepy-looking...

Slowly, she starts to detach herself, bifurcate, become an observer of her own being. She talks, not realizing quite what it is she's saying. She half-grasps what must be a terrifying mental condition: "I HATE seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I'm living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can't stop it... I could stand any of it if I could only surrender." She eventually develops a preternatural awareness of the house: "She could even hear... the dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood ageing."

And as we watch her disintegration, which leads to a fateful move at the end, we start to realize what is driving it. There are two faces to the house, you see: It is terrifying; and yet it is also comfortable. The beds are soft; the lawns are pleasant; the fire is warm; the housekeeper's cooking is delicious. It's Luke (who never had a mother) who puts his finger on it: "It's all so motherly... Everything so soft. Everything so padded." Yet he goes on to describe "great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcoming when you sit down, and reject you at once --"

Motherly...

Eleanor looked after her mother until she died: "The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister... She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair."

We learn that there has been something mysterious about the mother's death. Did Eleanor not hear when her incapitated parent yet again knocked on the wall that last fatal time? Or did she hear, but choose not to respond? Does she even know the answer to that question? Luke follows up his "motherly" observation with some more telling descriptors: "A mother house..., a housemother, a headmistress, a housemistress." It's at this point that Eleanor says: "It was my fault my mother died... It was going to happen sooner or later, in any case... But of course no matter when it happened, it was going to be my fault." True? Or self-inflicted imaginary guilt?

Drawing on what we're told (and on what we can guess by reading between the lines), we infer that Eleanor's mother was a fairly dictatorial woman, who laid down all the rules, and allowed her daughter no life of her own. The ensuing resentment and guilt-about-resentment that Eleanor has accrued over her life not only explain her inability to detach herself from this "motherly" house, but also explain her occasionally vicious thoughts towards Theodora, who sometimes adopts a quasi-maternal attitude towards her.

And so you start to understand: Just as Eleanor's life had been totally taken up, sucked dry even, by her mother, so she is receptive to being absorbed by Hill House, which assumes the nurturing but also terrifying and disciplining role of the mother-figure.



Jackson had a difficult relationship with her mother, Geraldine, who was often aggressively critical. According to Jackson's biographer, Ruth Franklin, quoted here, "Geraldine managed to insert herself into her daughter’s life in a way that Jackson resented, criticizing her appearance and offering unsolicited advice on household help, clothing, furniture, and other domestic matters... Her [mother’s] letters to Jackson are masterpieces of passive-aggression, disguising harsh critiques beneath a veneer of sweetness."

Well, in The Haunting of Hill House, it's pay-back time...

This is really so much more than a ghost story. As this commentator notes, it can be seen as "postmodern Gothic", where "the source of fear has shifted from the idea of an invading supernatural presence to the suggestion of repressed trauma... Perhaps the true horror of Hill House is the fear of being engulfed and losing one’s identity, being doomed to wander the halls of a lonely place forever."

But there's a broader feminist message there too: "[Jackson] was a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession... Two decades before the women’s movement ignited, Jackson’s early stories were already exploring the unmarried woman’s desperate isolation in a society where a husband was essential for social acceptance. As her career progressed and her personal life became more troubled, her work began to investigate more deeply the psychic damage to which women are especially prone. It can be no accident that in many of these works, a house -- the woman’s domain -- functions as a kind of protagonist... [and in] her late masterpieces, a house becomes both a prison and a site of disaster... Jackson was an important writer who happened also to be -- and to embrace being -- a housewife, as women of her generation were all but required to do."

All in all, very impressive. I think Laura Miller is spot on when she says: "Most ghost stories offer a cozy, armchair chill or two, but The Haunting of Hill House exudes a lingering, clammy dread."

Absolutely an author to read more of.