The Haunting of Hill House (3 page)

At any rate, Eleanor's dilemmas are those of a prepubescent child, not an adult woman; sexuality requires an autonomy and a self-knowledge she hasn't got yet. Romance rarely figures in the fantasy lives she imagines for herself. Jackson seemed to see sex as an uninteresting distraction from earlier, more fundamental questions of identity. In a rambling, unsent letter to Howard Nemerov, she complained about a British academic who claimed to have detected “lesbian” themes in her first novel:

This fear of guilt, of being commandeered by another consciousness and of the “destruction of identity,” is what Eleanor confronts in Hill House. “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster” she thinks when she's just arrived, “and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” Later, this engulfing menace comes into finer focus. Recoiling from the charnel stench of the library—something only Eleanor can smell—she presses herself to the wall and murmurs, “ ‘My mother—' . . . not knowing what she wanted to tell them.” Eleanor brings up her mother, often in half-conscious exclamations, when the subject is prohibitions and obligations, the impropriety of women in slacks or of leaving dirty dinner dishes out all night. But the specter of Eleanor's mother also arises when Theo paints Eleanor's toenails (“I hate having things done to me. . . . I don't like to feel helpless. . . . My mother—”), in the pounding on the walls, and in the forlorn messages that Mrs. Montague receives through the Ouija-like planchette. The spirit, calling itself “Eleanor Nellie Nell Nell,” laments that it is a “Child” and what it wants is “Home” and “Mother,” but that both are “Lost. Lost. Lost. Lost.”

When Eleanor finally agrees to surrender to Hill House, to bury herself in its “folds of velvet and tassels and purple plush,” it is her mother she goes chasing (“You're here somewhere”) through the dark halls and up the treacherous library ladder. The “lovers meeting” she has spent the whole novel humming about materializes as a return to the womb that is also a grave. To anyone who has, like Jackson, labored mightily to transcend her parents' mistakes and shortcomings, the horror underlying Eleanor's full-circle journey is real as well as ghostly. It is the recognition that the harder you try to escape the emotional dynamics of your family of origin, the more likely you are to duplicate them. It feels like fate, like doom, but is it?

Is Eleanor the victim of Hill House or of herself? She would certainly call it the former, but self-knowledge is not her forte. One evening, the four researchers discuss the roots of fear, the other three come up with viable theories: what we really fear is ourselves, or seeing ourselves clearly, or, as Theo most astutely puts it, “of knowing what we really want.” “I am always afraid of being alone,” Eleanor offers, an astonishing remark, considering how many of her fantasies involve solitude and seclusion.

Eleanor's insight into other people is no better than her grasp of her own nature. If she listened more carefully, with less of the self-absorption and hunger for attention that she's so quick to spot and condemn in the others, she would see that her three companions have had no better luck with families than she has had. “I never had a mother,” Luke tells her, a lament that both Eleanor and Theo regard as the hackneyed confidence of a seducer, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. (Later, Luke's observation that Hill House is “a mother house. . . . Everything so soft. Everything so padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once,” suggests he knows whereof he speaks.) From one of her passing jokes, we know that Theo spent vacations at her empty boarding school. The doctor is married (to a silly, domineering woman), but his family is also missing something; he hasn't had the chance, he explains, to test the soporific effects of Richardson's
Pamela
on small children.

For a while, these four people manage to cobble together a kind of mock romance of family life: Luke, Theo, and Eleanor roll around on the grass eating wild strawberries while Dr. Montague beams down on them in fond amusement. This is just a game, though, like the excruciatingly arch banter about bullfighters, courtesans, and disguised princesses they indulge in on the first night. Only Eleanor, not surprisingly, can't tell that it's not real. Theo, the one person in Hill House who offers Eleanor the difficult prospect of connection, is a flawed and prickly customer, to be sure, but she's also the one who shows her the most tender concern. When the entity haunting Hill House offers Eleanor a cold, false, phantom hand to hold, it is disguised as Theo's hand. The friction between the two women flares when Eleanor envies Theo's looks and freedom of manner (the first dig between them is Eleanor's sniping at Theo's appetite) or when Theo tries to coax Eleanor out of her shell or, most explosively, when she suggests that Eleanor might own some responsibility for what's happening. Theo's implication that Eleanor is not really the meek creature she appears to be may be what terrifies and infuriates Eleanor most; perhaps they both suspect that the most fearsome beast lurking in Hill House is Eleanor's stifled rage at her mother, her sister, her life, her self.

In the strangest of the novel's ghostly manifestations, Theo and Eleanor quarrel over Luke and stalk out of the house together into the night. Between them lies a knot of anger and pain but also genuine intimacy; they are acutely aware of each other: “Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other.” Eleanor has somehow blundered to the brink of a relationship in which she might learn to accommodate someone else's imperfections without hating her. At this moment, the world around the two women begins to change, the moonlit patterns of dark and light reverse themselves like a photographic negative: the path becomes dark and the surrounding trees and bushes white. “Now I am really afraid.” Eleanor thinks, in “words of fire.” Something moves almost imperceptibly around them in the “blackness and whiteness and evil luminous glow.” Then the path ends and the two women are confronted with a hallucinatory Technicolor vision of a garden in which delighted children play with a puppy while a mother and father watch affectionately from a checked picnic blanket spread on the grass. Then Theo looks over her shoulder, sees something unspeakable (she never describes it) and screams “Run!”

The scene is extraordinary, in part because whatever Theo sees while looking over her shoulder remains the one significant Hill House manifestation that Eleanor never witnesses. (There is the phantom dog that lures Dr. Montague and Luke out of the house on the night of the first manifestation, but that's just a decoy.) The two women stand, briefly suspended between a mirage of the familial idyll they have all pined for and whatever monstrous thing has driven them to it. Only Theo dares to look back.

Later, after Eleanor has been broken by the house, she insists that she will go home with Theodora. She will live near Theo and shop with her every day for the talismans of Eleanor's fantasy life: gold-rimmed dishes, a white cat, the cup of stars. Theo's flat rejection of this scenario doesn't seem to faze Eleanor at all. “Do you always go where you're not wanted?” Theo asks brutally, eliciting only the mild, self-pitying reply, “I've never been wanted anywhere.” No doubt on some level Eleanor never really believes she'll leave the house with Theo, who is, for better or worse, her only real friend; the whole plan smacks of a last jaunt through the dream world that has comforted Eleanor all her life. She has begun a negotiation with the absolute reality of her own isolation, and the slow process of dissolving into the fabric of Hill House.

The novel ends with the same lines that open it, closing the circle:

There is a moment in the car, the last moment, when Eleanor questions her choice, but it comes too late. If it is Eleanor who now walks in Hill House, then she has arrived at something not too far from her dream of living in the little cottage behind the barricade of poisonous oleander. She walks alone, and that, as Theo would probably point out, is the fate that she most feared and most desired.

Jackson, Shirley.
Come Along With Me
. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

———.
Life Among the Savages
. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

———.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

James, Henry.
The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction
. New York: Bantam Classics, 1981.

Oppenheimer, Judy.
Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson
. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1988.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Dr. John Montague was a doctor of philosophy; he had taken his degree in anthropology, feeling obscurely that in this field he might come closest to his true vocation, the analysis of supernatural manifestations. He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education. It had cost him a good deal, in money and pride, since he was not a begging man, to rent Hill House for three months, but he expected absolutely to be compensated for his pains by the sensation following upon the publication of his definitive work on the causes and effects of psychic disturbances in a house commonly known as “haunted.” He had been looking for an honestly haunted house all his life. When he heard of Hill House he had been at first doubtful, then hopeful, then indefatigable; he was not the man to let go of Hill House once he had found it.

Dr. Montague's intentions with regard to Hill House derived from the methods of the intrepid nineteenth-century ghost hunters; he was going to go and live in Hill House and see what happened there. It was his intention, at first, to follow the example of the anonymous Lady who went to stay at Ballechin House and ran a summer-long house party for skeptics and believers, with croquet and ghost-watching as the outstanding attractions, but skeptics, believers, and good croquet players are harder to come by today; Dr. Montague was forced to engage assistants. Perhaps the leisurely ways of Victorian life lent themselves more agreeably to the devices of psychic investigation, or perhaps the painstaking documentation of phenomena has largely gone out as a means of determining actuality; at any rate, Dr. Montague had not only to engage assistants but to search for them.

Because he thought of himself as careful and conscientious, he spent considerable time looking for his assistants. He combed the records of the psychic societies, the back files of sensational newspapers, the reports of parapsychologists, and assembled a list of names of people who had, in one way or another, at one time or another, no matter how briefly or dubiously, been involved in abnormal events. From his list he first eliminated the names of people who were dead. When he had then crossed off the names of those who seemed to him publicity-seekers, of subnormal intelligence, or unsuitable because of a clear tendency to take the center of the stage, he had a list of perhaps a dozen names. Each of these people, then, received a letter from Dr. Montague extending an invitation to spend all or part of a summer at a comfortable country house, old, but perfectly equipped with plumbing, electricity, central heating, and clean mattresses. The purpose of their stay, the letters stated clearly, was to observe and explore the various unsavory stories which had been circulated about the house for most of its eighty years of existence. Dr. Montague's letters did not say openly that Hill House was haunted, because Dr. Montague was a man of science and until he had actually experienced a psychic manifestation in Hill House he would not trust his luck too far. Consequently his letters had a certain ambiguous dignity calculated to catch at the imagination of a very special sort of reader. To his dozen letters, Dr. Montague had four replies, the other eight or so candidates having presumably moved and left no forwarding address, or possibly having lost interest in the supernormal, or even, perhaps, never having existed at all. To the four who replied, Dr. Montague wrote again, naming a specific day when the house would be officially regarded as ready for occupancy, and enclosing detailed directions for reaching it, since, as he was forced to explain, information about finding the house was extremely difficult to get, particularly from the rural community which surrounded it. On the day before he was to leave for Hill House, Dr. Montague was persuaded to take into his select company a representative of the family who owned the house, and a telegram arrived from one of his candidates, backing out with a clearly manufactured excuse. Another never came or wrote, perhaps because of some pressing personal problem which had intervened. The other two came.