Oct 28, 2023·edited Oct 28, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Thank you Ruth for one of the best group reads I have ever participated in. Both you and the group have been enlightening and entertaining. I agree that the ending is so very sad watching Eleanor slowly slip into insanity. Could she have been helped? We will never know.
You ask about Mike Flanagan's HH ending and I personally did not like it (my husband did). I really don't like when a work of art like this gets whitewashed to make us feel good. It makes me feel like the writer thinks we are children that cannot handle some truths. My husband said it was a hopeful ending and maybe it was but "feel good" was not Jackson's intent. The depths of mental illness, depression and loneliness are dark, frightening places and sometimes they reach the point of no return.
Thank you once again for all our hard work and insights! P.S. If you are looking for a really good Mike Flanagan series try Midnight Mass! Great series.
What struck me on this reading is how Mrs M is right there, insisting on sense--Arthur drives her, yes, please! And the core group dismisses her to their immediate and lasting regret.
I suppose Hill House is the definition of a hungry ghost, one that lures w whatever the weakest desires, in Eleanor's case, community, presses on the others to alienate and eject her, and voila, the house has another woman to add to its mix, which is a lonely, single, malevolent, entity.
(Rather like Marion Crane in Psycho, who grabs the money and runs, hoping for freedom but meeting w another hungry ghost.)
Now that everyone’s finished and there’s no chance of spoilers, I’ve been thinking about Jackson’s red herrings. They’re brilliant: she escalates the tension, over and over, with references to a grim ending. She arms Arthur with a Chekhov’s gun, has him talk about the importance of keeping it in good working order, about staying up with it—even has Dr. Montague suggest that he’s going to end up shooting someone. But nobody gets shot. She performs the Grattan song for us, with the wire around the throat reference, as well as Theo’s scarf and the rusty staircase and she throws in a yardarm reference for good measure. But the door to the tower is nailed shut. There’s the blood all over the walls and Theo’s clothes, which I took to be a reference to suicide by bloodletting. All of these allusions give us good cause to believe that Eleanor is going to take her life. But she doesn’t choose any of those methods, and I think that suggests in the end what Jackson has decided haunts Hill House: that first, untimely death, and with it the death of the family, left to infighting and disturbing parental advice. All of them are haunted by and undone by the premature death of the mother. As Eleanor is in the end, too—though her great loss occurred well before her mother’s actual death.
We tell, over and over, our own particular ghost stories of the events that haunt our lives. I wonder if this is what haunted Jackson, the absence of a loving, devoted mother. I was reading a New Yorker article, trying to find corroboration for my theory. Our intrepid leader’s biography is cited, and that’s when I realize: I’m an idiot. Why not just ask?
So Ruth, one last question before we let you go—with another great, big thank you—do you think what’s haunting Hill House is the absence of a mother? If not, what?
'“Eleanor has to go back the way she came,” Dr. Montague insists' - that was one of the sentences that leapt out at me reading the final sections. The other was: '"Walled up alive." Eleanor began to laugh again at their stone faces. "Walled up alive," she said. "I want to stay here."' Their stone faces conjures both the walls of Hill House and the stones from Eleanor's past. Eleanor has lived her life 'walled up alive'.
When Dr Montague says Eleanor has to go back the way she came, at first that felt hopeful to me - retracing the steps of her literal journey to Hill House and of a personal journey to arrive where she started anew - courtesy of T S Eliot, 'the end of all [her] exploring will be to arrive where [she] started and know the place for the first time.' Maybe. (I was reminded of the children's voices in the rose garden in the garden picnic scene earlier in the novel.) But it is not to be. It is therefore so disappointing when Eleanor isn't able to make that journey back though her last thoughts are revealing: 'she thought clearly,Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?' For once she thinks 'clearly'. Again there's a repetition of the same words as we've noted before. The final question hands responsibility to others, a pattern we associate with Eleanor, looking for care and support from elsewhere, with an underdeveloped locus of self-determination and self-valuation. Eleanor says of her time at Hill House, "It's the only time anything's ever happened to me. I liked it." and even then something's happened to her, it's not that she's made something happen. When she makes something happen, driving into the tree, it's due to loss of her faculties and possession by something other than her rational self.
My further feelings are a kind of frustration and anger that Dr Montague has decreed that she has to go back the way she came. If he had accepted Mrs Montague's quite sensible suggestion that she travel with Arthur, might that have been a better outcome for Eleanor? Uncertain but possible. She might have survived the journey and lived to tell the tale.
What do people make of the ending? What is this novel about? I'm left wondering.
This has been my first time rereading Hill House, and the whole time the last chapter has been ringing in my ears--especially Eleanor's last moment of lucidity, where she can only ask "why am i doing this? why dont they stop me?" It's a brilliantly crafted tragedy, and it sticks in my heart. I expect to reread it many more times, and I dont expect it to ever stop hurting.
All of my friends have had to listen to my rants about the netflix adaptation, and most of them havent read the book or seen the show, so i'm happy to talk about it here where there's a little more context lol
First, to answer your question about the end: I hate the new ending. I dont mind horror that focuses on hope or love or has a happy ending, but this is not that story, so to twist it up into that feels like a betrayal. (And that's without getting into the Audacity to edit Shirley Jackson's final paragraph, which is one of my favorite final paragraphs of all time even as it breaks my heart.)
The thing is, I would love the netflix show if it didnt have the hill house name & approximately three quotes from the book attached to it. It's a well done horror show, with genuine scares and a reveal that I thought was perfect. But as an adaptation, I feel like it took every theme that the book deals with and flips it entirely. Eleanor in the book is traumatized by her biological family treating her poorly, and the effects of that (along with the haunting) are the horror of the novel; in the show, the horror is that a biological family is broken up by ghosts and a malevolent house. Eleanor as a character is shattered across the other characters, to the point where Mrs. Dudley gives the cup of stars speech to Eleanor as a child, rather than Eleanor thinking it herself as an adult. And, honestly, as a lesbian, changing Theo and Eleanor to sisters and having Theo be out to her family and in a relationship with a woman who isnt central to the plot, is so much less meaningful than the subtext in the book. Like, Eleanor's simultaneous admiration of and fear of Theodora, and the moments where they dont quite talk about it, and even the moments when Eleanor is talking to Luke and trying to figure out what she's /supposed/ to be feeling, are all so resonant. Theodora in the netflix show might've been good representation, I dont know, but she wasn't resonant.
Anyway, that's probably enough rambling haha. The funny thing is i actually enjoyed the show! It's just once I was finished watching and had time to think about it, I got so frustrated with it as an adaptation.
Oct 28, 2023·edited Oct 28, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Thank you, Ruth, and everyone here, for welcoming me to the group as a latecomer. It has been such a privilege reading details about the background of this remarkable novel, and I can’t tell you how much I have looked forward to reading everyone’s observations, comments, questions, - What an incredible group of thinkers you all are! It’s been a blast. Thank you so much. 😊
Such a tragic ending, but sadly, not surprising, considering the way in which HH and E. have become so enmeshed by this point.
I agree, Ruth, that knowing the dynamic of SJ’s marriage makes this all the more heartbreaking. I can’t help but think of Shirley’s early letters to Stan when they first meet in college: Shirley is a gushing, innocent young woman full of hope and trust; and years later, after many betrayals, she writes him a letter of bitterness and heartbreak, telling him that the worst lie he ever told her was that she would never be lonely. 😢
I also think of how, even with all her success, she was still constantly criticized by her mother.
The feeling of rejection from 2 of the most crucial people in her life, along with the “villagers” of Bennington must have been excruciating.
I did watch the Flanagan series, but have no recollection of how it ended. I didn’t like it much.
My observations- Apologies if they are too obvious or repetitive of others’
-The sunlight in the morning- a foreboding sign of things to come. Thanks for clueing us into that, Ruth.
- The fact that E. sleeps in the baby’s room at her sister’s - Both echo the NURSERY and, again, the SISTERS.
- E. dies by crashing her car into the tree- Just as Hugh Crain’s first wife’s carriage overturned in front of the house, killing her, and, in chapter 3, Dr. M. tells them that a man tried to leave at night 18 years earlier, and died by his horse running into that tree.
- E thinks “Hill House belongs to me!” Has the spirit of the first wife overtaken her? Especially considering their deaths, and how she danced with Hugh?
- When E. says “Walled up alive,” it echoes what Mrs. M’s planchette wrote about the nuns. Would E. rather be walled up alive
in HH rather than leave? And E. knew she would, once again, feel walled up alive if she returned to her sisters house. Did SJ feel walled up alive? (She did become agoraphobic at one point in her later life)
- The route Dr. M. tells her to take goes back to the use of the numbers 5 and 3’s- Rt. 5, and 39 (3x3) and then the table is set for 5 instead of 6. What was this about, I wonder?. (I’m going to look up what those numbers mean in Tarot later)
- I was struck by Mrs. M wanting Arthur to drive her home. Yes! For some reason, Dr. M. felt like HH would follow her if she didn’t make some kind of clean break....Had HH put a spell on everyone except Mrs. M to make them not realize what a bad idea this was?
- When Theo is so kind in her goodbye to E. and talks about E. coming back to HH so they can have their picnic, it broke my heart, because it’s clear she is saying this in hopes it will get E. to go home.
- “Why am am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?” SJ tells us E. thinks “clearly.” It seems that HH’s final and cruelest curse on E. was to remove the spell from her in the final moment of her life so that she would be full of confusion and as to what had happened to her while at HH, and to feel the horror of what was now about to happen, and the anguish of no one helping her when she needed it most. At least, that’s my interpretation. I know there can be many different views of this.
-This is what makes me cry for Shirley. I’m sure she asked herself these questions many times. And it makes me sad....
Today and tomorrow, I will reread “The Tooth” and “The Visitor” and I think there were some other stories Ruth mentioned. It’s been a while, and I need me some more Shirley!
The ending of Hill House hits you so hard. For me, the first time I read it, the scene from the staircase through to the end was one long trudge through dread; I knew there was no chance Eleanor was going to make it out alive. The characters seem to be in denial, or maybe the fundamentally misunderstand something, but Eleanor was entirely hopeless by that point. I really can't imagine why they thought it was a good idea to put a clearly disturbed woman in a car to drive to a place she doesn't want to go and where she's not welcome; even Mrs. Montague seemed to have some clue of the bleakness of Eleanor's family life. What really hits me the hardest is Eleanor's question: "Why don't they stop me?" Why doesn't anyone care enough to do anything?
Since Ruth and a few comments have mentioned Mike Flanagan, I wanted to mention that I've really enjoyed all of his Netflix shows EXCEPT for The Haunting of Hill House. It seems like such a fundamental misunderstanding of the point. Hill House is a tragedy; it must end with catharsis, or the whole thing is empty. It's so frustrating to see a show from an otherwise talented filmmaker who's completely unwilling to provide the emotional closure that the story calls for.
To me, the ending of The Haunting of Hill House is somehow both painful and uplifting because it allows pain to be seen. Everyone has experienced the pain of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection, but it's not something that's talked about. You keep your pain to yourself because we can't spend our time trauma dumping on each other. But a tragedy gives a communal place for that pain; a tragedy tells you that you're not the only one in pain. Tragedy allows you to face that pain without hiding from it, which is what people need to heal.
Thank you, Ruth, for this wonderful experience. It was such a treat to be led through a reading of the book by someone who has such deep knowledge of Shirley Jackson's life and works. Looking forward to the Zoom session on Monday night!
I think the repetition of images is vital to the meaning of the book, and also a very smart and useful way to build a book. They give the story a lapidary quality, like light cutting through layers of water. And they give it structure and shape.
In a way the book seems like a long poem to me.
I don't find any of them overused, and "journeys end in lovers' meeting" which began as an odd-sounding snippet to me, became alive and potent.
To the question Ruth asks, paraphrase, does the house have supernatural powers or is E. an unstable lonely woman whose mind is generating the phenomena - I see it as a both/and not an either/or. E. the individual responds to the house, also an individual, and that meeting is what makes what happens, happen. That the house is still standing at the end is because it is a house and not a person.
Luke from early on in the book: "It's harder to burn down a house than you think."
E., Ch. 9 part 1: "I learned to sleep very lightly, she told herself comfortingly, when I was listening for my mother." Again the deliberately chosen adverb, in this case comfortingly, that modifies the thought to convey the precise emotion inside the thought.
E. not even sleeping any more enters the spirit of the house. She is a child and the idea of her becoming Theo's or Luke's lover is no longer possible to imagine. They all all treat her like an unloved child at the end, expressing their ostensible concern for her through banishment so they do not have to care for her themselves. Even Theo, whose conscience pricks her, but not sharply enough.
It is impossible not to think of E.'s guilt about her mother and her fear that she did not wake up when she was called. She is a lost child inside a house of pain. And no one can release her from it. They all turn deaf ears on her pleas. She lives in a world in misunderstanding.
"Why don't they stop me?"
Oh my gosh.
Well this is not the lightest of books hardly need to say - but reading it with Ruth Franklin (!!) and all of you has made it a light-filled joy for me these past weeks. Thank you. I am looking forward to the zoom meet!
The ending really is tragic - in the true sense. The suffering seems to transcend individual choices. Eleanor's plea that "It’s the only time anything happened to me, and I liked it.”
179 and then decides to join the house by killing herself, might seem like a moment of twisted transcendence, but her last thought was wondering why no one tried to stop her. Dr. M's entire endeavor is a laughing stock. Only Hill House itself remains.
Oct 28, 2023·edited Oct 28, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
{Just a little fun aside: I have enjoyed all the comparisons to “Psycho.” In my mind, I’ve also been seeing scenes and themes from “The Shining.” (And we know how much S. King loves SJ) The large, secluded, empty, old haunted “house” with the straight hallway with doors on either side. Just a small number of inhabitants that are “family,” and one of them being seemingly haunted by, and then as time goes on, completely possessed by, the house/hotel and its ghosts, all from the past, btw.. In The Shining, the son, is similar to Theo, in that he has a sense of clairvoyance. The message in blood on the wall. At the end, the one “chosen” by the house dies, and in the film version, there’s the creepy scene at the end where we see the old photo of Jack, (after he has frozen to death) as if he was either a part of the hotel in the past, or has been “absorbed” by the hotel as one of its spirits. Granted, there is no bloody murderous rampage in HH- “Heeeeeeere’s Eleanor!” (Sorry. I had to do it) but some of the other images and plot lines stood out to me…… }
This is my first reading of the novel so I didn’t know the ending. However, our close reading helped me see the journey to Eleanor’s loss of self and so her death was the inevitable final, tragic step. I know I have always distrusted the doctor from ‘Pamela’ onwards and so the fact he makes another ill-judged, irresponsible and actually heartless decision does not surprise me. That of the two it is Mrs M who demonstrated a greater duty of care is telling. She also judged Carrie well - a ‘vulgar’ individual more worried about her car and holiday than her sister. It also interests me that Luke goes off to Paris, his aunt hoping he stays for a while. It reminds me of Hugh Crain leaving his daughters and going to live in Europe where he eventually died. You might guess I’m also not a fan of Luke!
As I was reading the novel I wondered if Eleanor could have defeated her demons but however much I would have liked that for her, SJ’s choice of ending is the truer one. When the emptiness of Eleanor’s life is laid bare to the group it is unbearably sad - how does one overcome such lack? I suppose in a way Eleanor does in her final moments have some sort of breakthrough ‘Why am I doing this?’ but of course it comes too late.
Reading with APS is also a first for me and I have thoroughly enjoyed your esteemed company and fascinating insights. Reading your comments has enriched the reading experience for me and enhanced my admiration for Shirley Jackson’s craft. Thanks to you all.
Such a fun and enriching experience with you all! Makes the rereading so much deeper an experience than simply reading on one’s own. Thank you Ruth and the group!
Thank you so much for sharing all your insights and knowledge. Did you see that Elizabeth Hand has a novel out this month called A Haunting on the Hill? Set in the same house. I believe it's reviewed on the cover of this Sunday's NYTimes book review.
Thank you Ruth for one of the best group reads I have ever participated in. Both you and the group have been enlightening and entertaining. I agree that the ending is so very sad watching Eleanor slowly slip into insanity. Could she have been helped? We will never know.
You ask about Mike Flanagan's HH ending and I personally did not like it (my husband did). I really don't like when a work of art like this gets whitewashed to make us feel good. It makes me feel like the writer thinks we are children that cannot handle some truths. My husband said it was a hopeful ending and maybe it was but "feel good" was not Jackson's intent. The depths of mental illness, depression and loneliness are dark, frightening places and sometimes they reach the point of no return.
Thank you once again for all our hard work and insights! P.S. If you are looking for a really good Mike Flanagan series try Midnight Mass! Great series.
What struck me on this reading is how Mrs M is right there, insisting on sense--Arthur drives her, yes, please! And the core group dismisses her to their immediate and lasting regret.
I suppose Hill House is the definition of a hungry ghost, one that lures w whatever the weakest desires, in Eleanor's case, community, presses on the others to alienate and eject her, and voila, the house has another woman to add to its mix, which is a lonely, single, malevolent, entity.
(Rather like Marion Crane in Psycho, who grabs the money and runs, hoping for freedom but meeting w another hungry ghost.)
Now that everyone’s finished and there’s no chance of spoilers, I’ve been thinking about Jackson’s red herrings. They’re brilliant: she escalates the tension, over and over, with references to a grim ending. She arms Arthur with a Chekhov’s gun, has him talk about the importance of keeping it in good working order, about staying up with it—even has Dr. Montague suggest that he’s going to end up shooting someone. But nobody gets shot. She performs the Grattan song for us, with the wire around the throat reference, as well as Theo’s scarf and the rusty staircase and she throws in a yardarm reference for good measure. But the door to the tower is nailed shut. There’s the blood all over the walls and Theo’s clothes, which I took to be a reference to suicide by bloodletting. All of these allusions give us good cause to believe that Eleanor is going to take her life. But she doesn’t choose any of those methods, and I think that suggests in the end what Jackson has decided haunts Hill House: that first, untimely death, and with it the death of the family, left to infighting and disturbing parental advice. All of them are haunted by and undone by the premature death of the mother. As Eleanor is in the end, too—though her great loss occurred well before her mother’s actual death.
We tell, over and over, our own particular ghost stories of the events that haunt our lives. I wonder if this is what haunted Jackson, the absence of a loving, devoted mother. I was reading a New Yorker article, trying to find corroboration for my theory. Our intrepid leader’s biography is cited, and that’s when I realize: I’m an idiot. Why not just ask?
So Ruth, one last question before we let you go—with another great, big thank you—do you think what’s haunting Hill House is the absence of a mother? If not, what?
'“Eleanor has to go back the way she came,” Dr. Montague insists' - that was one of the sentences that leapt out at me reading the final sections. The other was: '"Walled up alive." Eleanor began to laugh again at their stone faces. "Walled up alive," she said. "I want to stay here."' Their stone faces conjures both the walls of Hill House and the stones from Eleanor's past. Eleanor has lived her life 'walled up alive'.
When Dr Montague says Eleanor has to go back the way she came, at first that felt hopeful to me - retracing the steps of her literal journey to Hill House and of a personal journey to arrive where she started anew - courtesy of T S Eliot, 'the end of all [her] exploring will be to arrive where [she] started and know the place for the first time.' Maybe. (I was reminded of the children's voices in the rose garden in the garden picnic scene earlier in the novel.) But it is not to be. It is therefore so disappointing when Eleanor isn't able to make that journey back though her last thoughts are revealing: 'she thought clearly,Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?' For once she thinks 'clearly'. Again there's a repetition of the same words as we've noted before. The final question hands responsibility to others, a pattern we associate with Eleanor, looking for care and support from elsewhere, with an underdeveloped locus of self-determination and self-valuation. Eleanor says of her time at Hill House, "It's the only time anything's ever happened to me. I liked it." and even then something's happened to her, it's not that she's made something happen. When she makes something happen, driving into the tree, it's due to loss of her faculties and possession by something other than her rational self.
My further feelings are a kind of frustration and anger that Dr Montague has decreed that she has to go back the way she came. If he had accepted Mrs Montague's quite sensible suggestion that she travel with Arthur, might that have been a better outcome for Eleanor? Uncertain but possible. She might have survived the journey and lived to tell the tale.
What do people make of the ending? What is this novel about? I'm left wondering.
Does anyone know what happened to the blood on the clothes?
pg 176
"Theodora's room? Luke asked. "I wouldn't like to go in there again.
Mrs. Montague sounded surprised. "I can't think why not," she said. "There's nothing wrong with it."
"I went in and looked at my clothes," Theodora said to the doctor . "They're perfectly fine."
Why don't they see the blood anymore?
This has been my first time rereading Hill House, and the whole time the last chapter has been ringing in my ears--especially Eleanor's last moment of lucidity, where she can only ask "why am i doing this? why dont they stop me?" It's a brilliantly crafted tragedy, and it sticks in my heart. I expect to reread it many more times, and I dont expect it to ever stop hurting.
All of my friends have had to listen to my rants about the netflix adaptation, and most of them havent read the book or seen the show, so i'm happy to talk about it here where there's a little more context lol
First, to answer your question about the end: I hate the new ending. I dont mind horror that focuses on hope or love or has a happy ending, but this is not that story, so to twist it up into that feels like a betrayal. (And that's without getting into the Audacity to edit Shirley Jackson's final paragraph, which is one of my favorite final paragraphs of all time even as it breaks my heart.)
The thing is, I would love the netflix show if it didnt have the hill house name & approximately three quotes from the book attached to it. It's a well done horror show, with genuine scares and a reveal that I thought was perfect. But as an adaptation, I feel like it took every theme that the book deals with and flips it entirely. Eleanor in the book is traumatized by her biological family treating her poorly, and the effects of that (along with the haunting) are the horror of the novel; in the show, the horror is that a biological family is broken up by ghosts and a malevolent house. Eleanor as a character is shattered across the other characters, to the point where Mrs. Dudley gives the cup of stars speech to Eleanor as a child, rather than Eleanor thinking it herself as an adult. And, honestly, as a lesbian, changing Theo and Eleanor to sisters and having Theo be out to her family and in a relationship with a woman who isnt central to the plot, is so much less meaningful than the subtext in the book. Like, Eleanor's simultaneous admiration of and fear of Theodora, and the moments where they dont quite talk about it, and even the moments when Eleanor is talking to Luke and trying to figure out what she's /supposed/ to be feeling, are all so resonant. Theodora in the netflix show might've been good representation, I dont know, but she wasn't resonant.
Anyway, that's probably enough rambling haha. The funny thing is i actually enjoyed the show! It's just once I was finished watching and had time to think about it, I got so frustrated with it as an adaptation.
Thank you, Ruth, and everyone here, for welcoming me to the group as a latecomer. It has been such a privilege reading details about the background of this remarkable novel, and I can’t tell you how much I have looked forward to reading everyone’s observations, comments, questions, - What an incredible group of thinkers you all are! It’s been a blast. Thank you so much. 😊
Such a tragic ending, but sadly, not surprising, considering the way in which HH and E. have become so enmeshed by this point.
I agree, Ruth, that knowing the dynamic of SJ’s marriage makes this all the more heartbreaking. I can’t help but think of Shirley’s early letters to Stan when they first meet in college: Shirley is a gushing, innocent young woman full of hope and trust; and years later, after many betrayals, she writes him a letter of bitterness and heartbreak, telling him that the worst lie he ever told her was that she would never be lonely. 😢
I also think of how, even with all her success, she was still constantly criticized by her mother.
The feeling of rejection from 2 of the most crucial people in her life, along with the “villagers” of Bennington must have been excruciating.
I did watch the Flanagan series, but have no recollection of how it ended. I didn’t like it much.
My observations- Apologies if they are too obvious or repetitive of others’
-The sunlight in the morning- a foreboding sign of things to come. Thanks for clueing us into that, Ruth.
- The fact that E. sleeps in the baby’s room at her sister’s - Both echo the NURSERY and, again, the SISTERS.
- E. dies by crashing her car into the tree- Just as Hugh Crain’s first wife’s carriage overturned in front of the house, killing her, and, in chapter 3, Dr. M. tells them that a man tried to leave at night 18 years earlier, and died by his horse running into that tree.
- E thinks “Hill House belongs to me!” Has the spirit of the first wife overtaken her? Especially considering their deaths, and how she danced with Hugh?
- When E. says “Walled up alive,” it echoes what Mrs. M’s planchette wrote about the nuns. Would E. rather be walled up alive
in HH rather than leave? And E. knew she would, once again, feel walled up alive if she returned to her sisters house. Did SJ feel walled up alive? (She did become agoraphobic at one point in her later life)
- The route Dr. M. tells her to take goes back to the use of the numbers 5 and 3’s- Rt. 5, and 39 (3x3) and then the table is set for 5 instead of 6. What was this about, I wonder?. (I’m going to look up what those numbers mean in Tarot later)
- I was struck by Mrs. M wanting Arthur to drive her home. Yes! For some reason, Dr. M. felt like HH would follow her if she didn’t make some kind of clean break....Had HH put a spell on everyone except Mrs. M to make them not realize what a bad idea this was?
- When Theo is so kind in her goodbye to E. and talks about E. coming back to HH so they can have their picnic, it broke my heart, because it’s clear she is saying this in hopes it will get E. to go home.
- “Why am am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?” SJ tells us E. thinks “clearly.” It seems that HH’s final and cruelest curse on E. was to remove the spell from her in the final moment of her life so that she would be full of confusion and as to what had happened to her while at HH, and to feel the horror of what was now about to happen, and the anguish of no one helping her when she needed it most. At least, that’s my interpretation. I know there can be many different views of this.
-This is what makes me cry for Shirley. I’m sure she asked herself these questions many times. And it makes me sad....
Today and tomorrow, I will reread “The Tooth” and “The Visitor” and I think there were some other stories Ruth mentioned. It’s been a while, and I need me some more Shirley!
The ending of Hill House hits you so hard. For me, the first time I read it, the scene from the staircase through to the end was one long trudge through dread; I knew there was no chance Eleanor was going to make it out alive. The characters seem to be in denial, or maybe the fundamentally misunderstand something, but Eleanor was entirely hopeless by that point. I really can't imagine why they thought it was a good idea to put a clearly disturbed woman in a car to drive to a place she doesn't want to go and where she's not welcome; even Mrs. Montague seemed to have some clue of the bleakness of Eleanor's family life. What really hits me the hardest is Eleanor's question: "Why don't they stop me?" Why doesn't anyone care enough to do anything?
Since Ruth and a few comments have mentioned Mike Flanagan, I wanted to mention that I've really enjoyed all of his Netflix shows EXCEPT for The Haunting of Hill House. It seems like such a fundamental misunderstanding of the point. Hill House is a tragedy; it must end with catharsis, or the whole thing is empty. It's so frustrating to see a show from an otherwise talented filmmaker who's completely unwilling to provide the emotional closure that the story calls for.
To me, the ending of The Haunting of Hill House is somehow both painful and uplifting because it allows pain to be seen. Everyone has experienced the pain of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection, but it's not something that's talked about. You keep your pain to yourself because we can't spend our time trauma dumping on each other. But a tragedy gives a communal place for that pain; a tragedy tells you that you're not the only one in pain. Tragedy allows you to face that pain without hiding from it, which is what people need to heal.
Thank you, Ruth, for this wonderful experience. It was such a treat to be led through a reading of the book by someone who has such deep knowledge of Shirley Jackson's life and works. Looking forward to the Zoom session on Monday night!
I am responding to yesterday's and today's posts.
I think the repetition of images is vital to the meaning of the book, and also a very smart and useful way to build a book. They give the story a lapidary quality, like light cutting through layers of water. And they give it structure and shape.
In a way the book seems like a long poem to me.
I don't find any of them overused, and "journeys end in lovers' meeting" which began as an odd-sounding snippet to me, became alive and potent.
To the question Ruth asks, paraphrase, does the house have supernatural powers or is E. an unstable lonely woman whose mind is generating the phenomena - I see it as a both/and not an either/or. E. the individual responds to the house, also an individual, and that meeting is what makes what happens, happen. That the house is still standing at the end is because it is a house and not a person.
Luke from early on in the book: "It's harder to burn down a house than you think."
E., Ch. 9 part 1: "I learned to sleep very lightly, she told herself comfortingly, when I was listening for my mother." Again the deliberately chosen adverb, in this case comfortingly, that modifies the thought to convey the precise emotion inside the thought.
E. not even sleeping any more enters the spirit of the house. She is a child and the idea of her becoming Theo's or Luke's lover is no longer possible to imagine. They all all treat her like an unloved child at the end, expressing their ostensible concern for her through banishment so they do not have to care for her themselves. Even Theo, whose conscience pricks her, but not sharply enough.
It is impossible not to think of E.'s guilt about her mother and her fear that she did not wake up when she was called. She is a lost child inside a house of pain. And no one can release her from it. They all turn deaf ears on her pleas. She lives in a world in misunderstanding.
"Why don't they stop me?"
Oh my gosh.
Well this is not the lightest of books hardly need to say - but reading it with Ruth Franklin (!!) and all of you has made it a light-filled joy for me these past weeks. Thank you. I am looking forward to the zoom meet!
The ending really is tragic - in the true sense. The suffering seems to transcend individual choices. Eleanor's plea that "It’s the only time anything happened to me, and I liked it.”
179 and then decides to join the house by killing herself, might seem like a moment of twisted transcendence, but her last thought was wondering why no one tried to stop her. Dr. M's entire endeavor is a laughing stock. Only Hill House itself remains.
{Just a little fun aside: I have enjoyed all the comparisons to “Psycho.” In my mind, I’ve also been seeing scenes and themes from “The Shining.” (And we know how much S. King loves SJ) The large, secluded, empty, old haunted “house” with the straight hallway with doors on either side. Just a small number of inhabitants that are “family,” and one of them being seemingly haunted by, and then as time goes on, completely possessed by, the house/hotel and its ghosts, all from the past, btw.. In The Shining, the son, is similar to Theo, in that he has a sense of clairvoyance. The message in blood on the wall. At the end, the one “chosen” by the house dies, and in the film version, there’s the creepy scene at the end where we see the old photo of Jack, (after he has frozen to death) as if he was either a part of the hotel in the past, or has been “absorbed” by the hotel as one of its spirits. Granted, there is no bloody murderous rampage in HH- “Heeeeeeere’s Eleanor!” (Sorry. I had to do it) but some of the other images and plot lines stood out to me…… }
This is my first reading of the novel so I didn’t know the ending. However, our close reading helped me see the journey to Eleanor’s loss of self and so her death was the inevitable final, tragic step. I know I have always distrusted the doctor from ‘Pamela’ onwards and so the fact he makes another ill-judged, irresponsible and actually heartless decision does not surprise me. That of the two it is Mrs M who demonstrated a greater duty of care is telling. She also judged Carrie well - a ‘vulgar’ individual more worried about her car and holiday than her sister. It also interests me that Luke goes off to Paris, his aunt hoping he stays for a while. It reminds me of Hugh Crain leaving his daughters and going to live in Europe where he eventually died. You might guess I’m also not a fan of Luke!
As I was reading the novel I wondered if Eleanor could have defeated her demons but however much I would have liked that for her, SJ’s choice of ending is the truer one. When the emptiness of Eleanor’s life is laid bare to the group it is unbearably sad - how does one overcome such lack? I suppose in a way Eleanor does in her final moments have some sort of breakthrough ‘Why am I doing this?’ but of course it comes too late.
Reading with APS is also a first for me and I have thoroughly enjoyed your esteemed company and fascinating insights. Reading your comments has enriched the reading experience for me and enhanced my admiration for Shirley Jackson’s craft. Thanks to you all.
Such a fun and enriching experience with you all! Makes the rereading so much deeper an experience than simply reading on one’s own. Thank you Ruth and the group!
Thank you so much for sharing all your insights and knowledge. Did you see that Elizabeth Hand has a novel out this month called A Haunting on the Hill? Set in the same house. I believe it's reviewed on the cover of this Sunday's NYTimes book review.