The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Day 16
Chapter 8, Part 1-3
Eleanor awakens with a new feeling of oneness with the house: suddenly she can hear “everything, all over,” including Mrs. Montague and Arthur coming down the stairs before the others do. Their obliviousness no longer feels as comic to me now.
What do we make of the scene in which Eleanor tries to force herself into Theodora’s life and is summarily rejected? She doesn’t react emotionally, or really at all. And then the next, in which Eleanor imagines her future life with Theodora—“I could help her in her shop… We could go anywhere we pleased, to the edge of the world if we liked”—and finds instead “a call she had been listening for all her life,” an embrace by unseen arms that makes her feel at last loved and safe.
Eleanor’s revelation about her guilt over her mother is dropped in almost as an aside. If fear and guilt are indeed sisters, Eleanor’s fear is rooted in her guilt over her mother’s death. Eleanor reversed roles with her invalid mother, she the caretaker and her mother the dependent; in Hill House the roles reverse again, the hallways filled with ghostly children who pound on the doors and laugh at the keyhole but will never be allowed in. In the end, the house itself takes on a kind of maternal role: “housemother,” as Luke puns. The furniture is “padded,” yet “hard and unwelcoming”; it is “vile,” “diseased,” “unclean,” just as Eleanor’s mother was in her illness.
In a lecture titled “Experience and Fiction,” in which Jackson discusses the writing of Hill House, she writes that she sleepwalked one night and found on her desk the next morning a piece of paper on which she had scrawled “DEAD DEAD.” I could find no such paper among the drafts of the novel in her archive; instead, there was a page on which she had scribbled “FAMILY FAMILY.” In the world of the novel, are the two essentially the same?
Join us on October 30 for a virtual discussion of The Haunting of Hill House with Ruth Franklin.
 | A guest post by
|
“DEAD DEAD”. . . .“FAMILY FAMILY.” Thanks Ruth, for that creepy addition. It does feel like an underpinning for Eleanor’s experience; the fact that the phrase/chant “FAMILY FAMILY” didn’t make it into the manuscript makes it read like an additional apparition underlying the text.
It also reminds me of this in part 3 of today’s pages:
“ “Eleanor, Eleanor,” and she heard it inside and outside her head; this was a call she had been listening for all her life. ”
Even before reading Ruth’s commentary, I underlined the two-word repetition of Eleanor’s name that is repeated. “DEAD DEAD,” “FAMILY FAMILY,” ELEANOR ELEANOR,” the repeated two words reflect both a loneliness and longing-ness (not certain that longingness is a word but will keep it). The house and its haunted spirits are so skillfully seducing Eleanor through her vulnerability. I also am reminded that the months after losing parent (as Eleanor may be in this book) can for some create a sense of non-being or relearning how to firmly be in the present world.
I still don’t know what to think of Mrs. Montegue. I see this as a good thing…Jackson is pulling me in the narrative even in these last chapters, to see where it all will end.
I went back here to Twelfth Night at the end of section 3. It’s clear Luke and Theo are the lovers meeting, so who--or more to the point, what--is left for Eleanor?
I looked at the rest of the Twelfth Night excerpt, particularly the line “your true love’s coming that can sing both high and low,” which captures the voices of Hill House, described as alternately low babbling and rising laughter. Jackson seems to have used the excerpt as a blueprint for how HH will woo Eleanor.