The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Day 13

Chapter 6

In my book about Jackson, I read Hill House as a commentary on Jackson’s tortured marriage to literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who both supported her creative work and sabotaged it, likely beset with jealousy and competitiveness (his own career did not go as he hoped it to). The people we hold by the hand are our intimates: parents, children, spouses. To discover oneself clinging to an unidentifiable hand and ask “Whose hand was I holding?” is to recognize that we may never truly know those with whom we believe ourselves most familiar. One can sleep beside another person for twenty years, as Jackson had with Hyman by this point, and still feel that person to be at times a stranger.

“We are only afraid of ourselves,” the doctor says. Luke elaborates, but says the same thing: “Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.” (Absolute reality, again.) “Of knowing what we really want,” Theodora adds. (What does she really want?) And Eleanor is afraid of “being alone,” but also of disintegration, “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…” Jackson, too, always feared psychic disintegration, which is a key theme of her earlier novels Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest. Marriage, to her, was one way in which women lost their identities. “We are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize,” she wrote in her letter about fear.

“Fear and guilt are sisters,” the novel tells us now—another of my favorite lines.

---

So much going on in this chapter: the weird, failed flirtation between Eleanor and Luke; the grisly scrapbook Hugh Crain made for his motherless daughter; Eleanor and Theodora’s vision in the woods. Why are Eleanor and Luke unable to speak directly to each other? For once, Luke doesn’t seem to be laying on a heavy layer of irony. Why can’t Eleanor take him at his word? What is he suggesting will happen “afterwards, when you go home…”? Is he really just a cad, a sad guy moaning about never having had a mother, or is he trying to make a real connection with her and failing, because of her heavy defenses and assumptions?

---

In 1901, two Englishwomen traveling together, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor (note the name) Jourdain, visited Versailles. Walking through the gardens to the Petit Trianon, they became lost and had a series of strange visions. Later they came to believe that they had somehow stumbled on a scene from the time of Marie Antoinette. The women wrote a book detailing the experience called An Adventure, which Jackson referred to in her notes for the novel as “one of the greatest ghost stories of all time.” Though she doesn’t mention it, one theory about what happened to the women was that they were in the grips of a “lesbian folie à deux.” More here.

Whether or not that’s part of the dynamic between Eleanor and Theodora in this scene, their experience of stumbling on this vision of a picnic, which unaccountably terrifies them, does feel similar to what may have happened to Moberly and Jourdain. Here, for once, we do see a happy nuclear family together: the parents, the children, the picnic, the puppy. What we don’t see is the thing that terrifies Theodora when she looks back. What do you think Jackson is suggesting here? Do you find this scene frightening? 

---