“Do not make deals with the fey,” a friend of mine has said. This, I find is a profound, yet simple lesson that can apply well to the plot of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Belief in the supernatural is not necessarily important to getting meaning from a statement such as this, and taking it with the story of Eleanor’s relationship with Hill House can allow for a cautionary tale against getting too consumed by anxiety and paranoia. The Haunting of Hill House is an advertisement for and indirect endorsement of psychiatry that I didn’t expect, but am altogether thrilled with. I read this entire book over two days, and while it isn’t a particularly long novel at 234 pages, I am still surprised as to how deeply invested I was in this narrative. For those who have not read it, or have only watched the Netflix adaptation (which while excellent is wildly different than the source material), a spoiler warning is in order.
This novel is one of the most commonly praised as an inspiration for the horror genre, and it is perhaps equally commonly criticized as “not being scary,” or taking too long to get to the scary parts. I wholeheartedly disagree with the assessment that it takes too long to get frightening, as the way Jackson writes allows for a hyperlinked approach to reading. The latter half of the book where the true haunting becomes apparent illuminates the former half of the book as not being as innocuous as it initially seems.
To summarize, the protagonist, Eleanor, is a deeply troubled woman, who lives with her sister and brother-in-law, sharing a car with them, and feeling wholly unwelcome in her own home. This is illustrated brilliantly in part one, chapter three, where she is continually asserting that because she paid half of the price of the car she shares with her sister, she has partial ownership of it, and should be allowed to use it. She is continually shut down, interrupted, ignored:
“…I don’t think I can see my way clear to letting you borrow my car.”
“It’s half my car.”
“No,” Carrie said. “You may not.”
(pg. 10)
Eleanor sees the invitation to work with Dr. Montague in Hill House as first and foremost, an opportunity to be wanted somewhere. Discovering a close (and debatably queer-coded) friend in Theodora, Eleanor has this need to be accepted nurtured, unquestioningly for the first time in her life. I found myself relating very much with Eleanor’s feelings, that primarily being the result of Jackson’s brilliant job of making the prose feel like the reader is inside Eleanor’s head. Her thoughts not being punctuated or demonstrated visually in any way beyond the simple words “she thought,” allows for an unbroken inner monologue that could only be (and in this case I would argue ante) by writing fully in first person. Eleanor’s feelings of needing to be wanted are communicated to the reader in a way that allows the obsessive nature of her personality at first to fly under the radar, go almost completely unnoticed.
As the story continues, strange occurrences begin to take shape specifically around Eleanor, and because they spend so much time together, Theodora. They experience loud incorporeal bangings, writing manifesting on the walls, and bodiless laughing, the prime message being “ELEANOR COME HOME.” Eleanor begins to perceive being cut off from the rest of the group, and by the end of the novel, she gives in, verbally saying aloud to the house that she will indeed, “come home.” After this, I believe Eleanor has locked in her fate, and no longer has the ability to leave Hill House. This culminates in Eleanor sneaking out of her room at night and running to the top of the tower, mirroring a suicide in the history of the house, and being stopped by the rest of the group. Following this, the group decides Eleanor is no longer safe to remain in Hill House, and forces her to leave by car, only for her to deliberately kill herself by crashing into a tree the property, completing the house’s goal of consuming her spirit.
I cannot do the tale justice myself, and implore you to read it for yourself, as it truly is an excellent piece of horror fiction. Eleanor, before her climactic episode spends a day stalking the other members of the cast, waiting for them to talk about her, in paranoia that they’re making fun of her behind her back, and when they don’t do this, she interprets it as them not caring about her at all. It’s a very interesting deconstruction of anxiety; we are in Eleanor’s head, and see her every thought laid bare. She will in one chapter describe Theodora glowingly, and in the next read malice and wickedness behind every word.
If I had to designate a core message to this story, it would be that it is unwise, and in cases unsafe to your own wellbeing to place too much importance on the opinions others have of you. It is entirely possible to get lost in your own ideas of inadequacy, and can lead to your undoing.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a definite reccomendation on my part.
