The Haunting of Hill House (2 page)

As a writer, Jackson developed a lucrative sideline producing witty autobiographical sketches of her endearingly chaotic family life for women's magazines. The pieces, collected in two popular volumes,
Life Among the Savages
and
Raising Demons
, were how some of her readers knew her best. The contrast between these essentially sunny vignettes and Jackson's much darker fiction—especially the short story “The Lottery,” which caused a sensation when it was published in
The New Yorker
in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since—must have baffled those fans who came to her work from the pages of
Good Housekeeping
. Shirley Jackson's two authorial personas were equally authentic; she prided herself as much on her generous mothering and culinary skills as on her cool literary examinations of human wickedness. Still, the difficulty of integrating these contradictory selves surely contributed to the way the women in her novels tend to come in pairs.

It's striking, for example, that a writer who depicted the sisterly bond with such passion had no sister of her own. Jackson was born, in 1916, to handsome middle-class parents in San Francisco and raised with her younger brother in one of the city's affluent suburbs. To her elegant, conventional mother, Jackson—ungainly, eccentric, brilliant, and plain—was a perennial vexation. The relationship would torment Jackson, too, for the rest of her life. She would alternate between defying her parents (by marrying a Jew, by refusing to live up to her mother's standards of grooming, by becoming fat) and trying to outdo them. In Jackson's letters home, Oppenheimer detects a tireless campaign to camouflage stresses and crises while presenting Jackson's family life as more warm and loving than the one her mother provided. The demanding, cold, and critical mothers who figure in Jackson's fiction, including Eleanor's own dead-but-not-gone parent, owe much to Geraldine Jackson.

Jackson's parents moved the family east, to Rochester, New York, when Shirley was sixteen. After a disastrous stint at the nearby University of Rochester, she finally began to establish her independence at Syracuse University. Hyman, one of the student body's Young Turks, read a story Jackson published in the college newspaper and announced that he was going to marry the author. It was entirely in character that two years later that's exactly what he did. After a few unsatisfactory years in New York City apartments, the couple and their two oldest children moved to North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman, who had been working as a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, got a job teaching at Bennington College. Most of the faculty's families lived in on-campus housing, but Jackson insisted on living in town.

It was a choice that perpetuated her outsider status. Jackson didn't want to be subsumed into the college as a faculty wife, but she didn't fit into old rural New England either. Xenophobic, tight-lipped, and possibly inbred Yankee country folk begin to make appearances in her fiction at this point. A small town in Vermont is the setting for “The Lottery,” and the town square where the locals gather to ritually stone to death one of their citizens was based on the square in North Bennington. Jackson told one friend the story was about anti-Semitism, a prejudice she felt keenly in North Bennington, but it's likely that she would have been excluded even if her husband had been a WASP. North Bennington was the kind of place where you were considered a newcomer unless your grandfather had been born there.

The houses were another matter. In
Life Among the Savages
, Jackson combined into one the family's two beloved houses (a rental and later a purchase) in North Bennington. She described this slightly phantasmagorical composite home as “old, noisy and full,” a marked contrast to Hill House, with its empty halls and preternatural silence (most of the time, at least). But Jackson also saw her houses as having wills of their own, including insistent ideas about how their rooms should be arranged. “After a few vain attempts at imposing our own angular order on things,” she wrote, “with a consequent out-of-jointness and shrieking disharmony that set our teeth on edge, we gave in to the old furniture and let things settle where they would.” Her daughter, she said, claimed to hear “a far away voice in the house that sang to her at night,” and there was a “door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside,” as well as “another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close goodhumoredly for a time when some special reason required it.”

The good humor of the house in
Life Among the Savages
and the malevolence of Hill House are phenomena of the same order, despite the difference in tenor. The big, old, semi-personified manse is a fixture of gothic literature, as Jackson, who boned up on ghost stories in preparation for writing
The Haunting of Hill House
, well knew. But she had always had a fascination with the various ways people and the spaces they occupy influence each other; of the divided heroine of
The Bird's Nest
, she wrote, “It is not proven that Elizabeth's personal equilibrium was set off balance by the set of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time.” The gothic house can stand for any number of things, depending on the interpretative inclination of the observer: sexuality, the female body, the family, the psyche. All of those understandings, with the exception of sex—a topic Jackson avoided—apply to Hill House.

Jackson's ghost story, published in 1959, was a hit; it became a bestseller, the critics praised it, and the movie rights sold for a goodly sum. The incipient madness of Eleanor Vance seemed to affect her creator, though—or perhaps it was the other way around.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
is narrated by a girl who is even more disturbed; at one point, she sets the house on fire to scare off her sister's suitor. Jackson, a mercurial personality at best and aggravated by the prescription amphetamines she took like aspirin, experienced her own psychic disintegration not long after finishing that final novel, a breakdown triggered when one of her husband's many affairs with Bennington students took an uncharacteristically serious turn. Eventually, Jackson pulled herself together with the help of a psychiatrist, but the burden of so many years worth of bad habits proved to be harder to conquer. She died in her sleep, of cardiac arrest, at age forty-eight.

The Haunting of Hill House
, after “The Lottery,” is the work most often associated with Jackson, but she is no longer widely read. This isn't necessarily surprising; the successful novelists of one generation often evaporate from the awareness of the next, and it probably didn't help her reputation in literary circles that she sometimes wrote as a kind of thinking woman's Erma Bombeck. (Then, even more than now, the domestic realm was viewed as insufficiently serious.) Still, Jackson's clean, terse style and her tough-mindedness ought to appeal to the kind of readers who keep Patricia Highsmith and James M. Cain in print today. In a way, Jackson was a kindred spirit to the hard-boiled genre novelists of her time. She also depicted the cruel jokes of fate and chance unfolding in an amoral universe. It's just that instead of doing it with men and guns, she chose to write about mad, lonely girls and big, sinister houses.

 

The prevailing mood of
The Haunting of Hill House
, the spell of the book that so many readers have found so hard to shake, is one of physical and psychic claustrophobia. The surrounding hills bear down on the house, the doors and windows refuse to remain open, some rooms are entirely encased in other rooms and, as Theo puts it, the decor was designed by Victorians, who “buried themselves in folds of velvet and tassels and purple plush.” It is a very comfortable place in some ways—the beds are soft, Mrs. Dudley's cooking is excellent—but its cushioned embrace is suffocating.

Eleanor arrives at Hill House flush with dreams of liberation only to find herself irrevocably trapped in that embrace. She has defied her sister's authority in taking the family car, and for a few brief hours, before she arrives at Hill House, she is a quintessential American, savoring the bliss of the open road. The car, at last, “belonged entirely to her, a little contained world all her own”; the drive is a “passage of moments, each one new, carrying her along with them, taking her down a path of incredible novelty to a new place.” She might stop anywhere at random, or she might “never leave the road at all, but just hurry on and on until the wheels of the car were worn to nothing and she had come to the end of the world.” She stops in a restaurant for lunch and silently cheers on a little girl who refuses to drink milk out of an ordinary glass instead of her favorite “cup of stars.”

Along the way Eleanor weaves the landmarks she sees into a running fantasy life that, besides a kind of smothered rage, we soon recognize to be one of her chief traits. She sees a pair of stone lions and imagines herself the chatelaine of a fine house, respected in the town, sipping elderberry wine, looked after by “a little dainty old lady.” A stand of oleander trees prompts a fairy tale reverie in which Eleanor plays a long-lost princess, returned at last to the grief-stricken queen and greeted by feasting and the advent of a prince. Finally and most alluring, there is a little cottage, “buried in a garden,” where she imagines living all alone, behind a wall of roses and more oleanders, where “no one would ever find me.”

Fragments of these fantasies appear in the lies Eleanor will later tell Theo about her little apartment in the city, like the pieces of everyday life that turn up in dreams. Eleanor's fantasies serve as a bulwark against the actuality of her life, the grim years she spent at the beck and call of a failing, miserable mother and later, at her sister's house, the sad cot in the baby's room. Even after her mother's death, Eleanor has been relegated to the nursery, bossed around and kept on a short leash. Her identification with the likes of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty makes a certain sense; she's had an unloving family who consigned her to menial labor and refused to let her grow up. Eleanor is drifting in and out of a dream state even before she arrives at Hill House, endlessly taking apart and reassembling bits of fantasy and experience to fashion the imagined life she hopes eventually to live.

Eleanor may be excessively dreamy, but she doesn't start out mad. Dreaming, the opening lines of the novel explain, is exactly what keeps someone from going crazy. Dreams shelter even the primitive minds of larks and katydids from those “conditions of absolute reality” that would drive any “live organism” insane. Hill House is “not sane,” as the narrator informs us, so presumably it is not only alive but existing under conditions of absolute reality—a strange assertion to make about a house, especially a haunted one. Although Eleanor's experiences at Hill House will be both bizarre and fantastic, and she will eventually become deranged enough to deliberately drive her car into a tree, what she is headed toward is not delusion but a collision with this “absolute reality.” Hill House will force her to acknowledge that she will never be free, that her dreams of leaving her corrosive past and her family behind are illusions, that wherever she goes she will only find the same hell she was running away from. Escape is a mirage. This is the real horror of Hill House.

Jackson knits the circular nightmare of Eleanor's story using interlocking patterns of doubles and reversals. Eleanor's naive hope is that at Hill House she'll find companionship to replace the family she's abandoned. The morning after the first disturbances, she arrives downstairs to breakfast with the other three researchers believing (or wanting to believe) that they “had come through the darkness of one night, they had met morning in Hill House, and they were a family, greeting one another with easy informality and going to the chairs they had used last night at dinner, their own places at the table.”

The Haunting of Hill House
is laced with broken, destructive families, with particular emphasis on volatile relations between women. The Crain sisters who quarrel bitterly over Hill House mirror Eleanor and her sister, Carrie, fighting about who gets to use the car bought with their dead mother's money. In Theo, at first, Eleanor seems to see the possibility of a “good” sister to make up for the selfish, controlling real one. The two women latch onto each other from the moment they meet with the extravagant, superficial devotion of newly acquainted schoolgirls, swapping tales of adolescent humiliations and planning picnics. Throughout, they get along best when playing tag and lolling around their rooms like sorority girls. When the friendship goes bad, as such relationships often do, they can turn spectacularly cruel.

Eleanor's crush on Luke is rather half-heartedly conveyed by Jackson; it doesn't even seem to convince Eleanor herself. During their only conversation alone together (her only conversation alone with any man, Eleanor notes), she concludes that he's “selfish,” and even worse, “not very interesting.” Robert Wise's fine 1963 film version of the novel,
The Haunting
(skip the awful 1999 remake), transfers Eleanor's affections to a glamorized Dr. Montague, a shrewd choice. But giving Eleanor a more plausible, Oedipal love object diverts attention from the novel's most charged and significant relationship, that between Eleanor and Theo. There's a small murkiness in this otherwise fiercely lucid book, around the matter of romantic love. Theo's sexuality is ambiguous; she lives with a “friend” to whom she is not married and whose gender remains coyly unspecified. At times, Eleanor's crush on Luke seems like Jackson's way of asserting that her attachment to Theo isn't erotic, and Theo's possible lesbianism is a way to state that her rivalry with Eleanor isn't over Luke.