I’ve wondered ever since if I did wake up. If I did wake up and hear her, and if I just went back to sleep. It would have been easy, and I’ve wondered about it.” -- Did Eleanor accidentally or intentionally kill her mother. She says “But of course, no matter when it happened it was going to be my fault.” It seems that Eleanor was raised with a lot of guilt, because no matter what happened she was going to feel at fault.
I think Eleanor now feels disconnected and unmoored and lonely. She is grasping at Theo for companionship. Its sad!
“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 admired Jackson’s choice to put Eleanor into silent mode. After her abortive effort to have Theo adopt her in section 2, she says, “Theo?” once at the beginning of section 3, and then goes dark for two pages. Luke and Theo talk around her, talk for her, but she says nothing until she claims the blame for her mother’s death. It punches up her confession even more and escalates the tension in the scene. I’ve gotta remember that a character saying nothing is more powerful than one jabbering on.
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.
These sections show the chasms between the characters. Mrs M goes on about dust and no activity while Arthur gripes about the branch while our four were all in hell. And Mrs M persists in thinking of the manifestations as external and individuated not realizing that the call is coming from within the house--both to and from Eleanor.
In section 2, Eleanor reaches out to Theo and is rejected. "Lightly" says the text. And rather than being crushed and hurt, E is placid. She is used to being unwanted. How mundane and horrible. Then, there is no real gap between 2 and 3. Why make them segmented other than to emphasize the fragmentation, alienation, disintegration? It's like they're not even in the same room. Nell's only dialogue in the next section is "Theo?" It's the other two talking about her, Theo casual and cruel, Luke not descending to that level. Both talking AT Eleanor, not with her. Then a white space, then the trip down to the brook, we get back in Eleanor's head, hear a calling and approach but she finds Theo and Luke not there and something else approaching, calling, wanting. When she runs away, accuses them they have their veneer of cool politesse back on, the kind of mask, hard candy shell, that Eleanor just doesn't possess. (And is even thicker for Mrs M and Mrs Dudley!)
The rushing down the hill and calling reminded me of a story with a house on a hill in a picture, and someone calling, and places being swapped. I found it in the Shirley Jackson collection Dark Tales, "The Story We Used to Tell"
I've been getting big "swapping" vibes on this read that reminded me of that story, and also the horror movie It Follows.
Wow. That is so interesting about the sleepwalking pages. I would say that, in Eleanor’s case, DEAD DEAD and FAMILY FAMILY are, sadly, the same.
These chapters were some of the most powerful for me. From the opening sentence, (I laughed outloud) when Theo echoes Mrs. Dudley’s words about clearing at 10, in my mind, I heard her saying those words in a flat and robotic way, just like Mrs. Dudley; but I thought this could be interpreted as Theo just being sarcastic or showing that Theo is now becoming as robotic as Mrs. Dudley in the daily routines of the meals.
Eleanor can now hear everything in the house. They are in tune with one another. Unsurprisingly, Mrs.D and A heard and experienced nothing that the others did the night before.
When E. announces to Theo that she is going home with her, the scene was heartbreaking to me, with E saying “I want to be someplace where I belong.”
And when Theo finally snaps and says “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” E’s reaction is to smile “placidly” (thank you adverb!) and says “I’ve never been wanted anywhere.” Creepy isn’t the right word, but it’s as if E has accepted and surrendered to her fate as “not wanted” and is actually embracing it? Very sad.
In the next section, when Luke uses the metaphor of the furniture to being “motherly...... Which turn out out to be hard... and reject you at once,” of course I thought of E’s mother and the fact the Luke had said his mother had died--- and all the mothers and children related to HH, and then a thought occurred to me.
Suddenly, I thought of the very FIRST MOTHER for whom Hill House was built and who, tragically, was never able to live within it with her family. The first mother, Hugh Crain’s wife, died when her carriage overturned in the driveway before she even entered the house. The thought occurred to me that perhaps she is the ghost haunting Hill House? And with all the sounds of children, and the way the nursery seems to be the most haunted place in the house. Just a thought. Hmmm.
Then Theo and Luke begin speaking to one another as if E isn’t there - after Theo’s mean comment to E. about writing on the walls made me wonder if HH is turning Theo against E. I was happy to see Luke call out Theo’s cruelty.
The shepherds dancing in the Easter egg with the shepherdess in pink and blue (there’s that blue again!) is interesting and I’m trying to figure out its meaning. It’s Biblical due to it being an Easter egg and shepherds.
Then, E’s confession that she thinks it’s her fault her mother died. The symmetry of her mother banging on the walls and the same sounds they hear at HH make perfect sense. E. seems completely relieved from her guilt when Theo tells her “If it hadn’t happened you would never have come to Hill House,” because E. is then “Smiling” and walking “comfortably” (Thank you adverb) and thinks “I will not be frightened or alone any more,” and she fantasizes about her future.
The final part of the chapter was, I think, so pivotal. Eleanor is now “leading” then to the top of the hill and believes she has finally “earned” her happiness. “I’m am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy...In Will not forget this moment in my life” - There is a sense of foreboding when she hears Theo and Luke walking behind her with the grass moving “hissingly” (adverb)
Then, we return to ‘watching the unseen.’ E. sees and hears what seems to be invisible footsteps on the path, and hears her name called - and thinks it was “a call she had been listening for all her life.” It continues to call her, and then “she was held tight and safe” and says to the spirit “Don’t let me go.”
She sees the invisible footsteps walk over the water (another biblical reference ?)
It strikes me that this moment happens when she feels absolved of her guilt and finally feels “joy.”
Also, Jackson doesn’t describe the sound of the voice. She doesn’t say if it’s male or female? Maternal? A lover? All of the above?
This was truly a pivotal moment for Eleanor and the overall arc of the book, I think. Eleanor has now had physical contact with the spirit of HH, and wants it to come back.
I saw eleanor asking theo if she cd come live with her as a last vestige of her wish to belong somewhere on the living plane to someone. That she has such a flat response to theos response shows how futile she already knos it is. She is really already too far gone in the houses deadly and deathly embrace
Whew, that dialog in Section 2! From delusion ("I am going to follow you home" - "I can get a job, I won't get in your way." -E) to cruelty ("I am not in the habit of taking home stray cats." & Do you always go where you're not wanted?"- T) to sad resignation ("I am a kind of stray cat, aren't I?" & "I have never been wanted anywhere"- E) - to Theo's attempts to lay out the reality of their situation -- the entire conversation encapsulates the relationship between Eleanor and Theo that has developed in their short time at HH.
It surprised me how cruel Theo and Luke are in their joking. They previously, even with the Dr. Smile after she’s had a “spell” , but this seems like unnecessary digs. Aka “mean girls”. There is something in Eleanor’s being so naive and unstable that takes away the ghostliness for me. That is, there were invisible footsteps coming through the grass, well of course there were!
Finally, going back to the very start, remind me what Carrie’s deal is. I mean, Eleanor comes off like she’s not socialized at all and been locked up with mean crazy mom. What has Carrie’s role been as a supportive sibling and daughter?!
To your question, Ruth, “In the world of the novel, are the two essentially the same?”:
I think, yes.
And I also think that, perhaps—given Hyman (he would leap for Philippe Halsman, but not for fidelity), the confines of household, vacuuming, laundering, child rearing, etc—in Jackson’s life away from the novel, catching a breath to write was like gasping away the death of her spirit within family.
A part of me thinks that family, or FAMILY FAMILY is very much alive in these pages! Not dead or DEAD DEAD at all. The first word contextualizes the second. Like the difference between someone being dead and being dead dead. As family family means something that family by itself does not. As if someone might say, this is my real family, and this is my family family. Which it seems could be good or bad, depending. (Dead dead does seem pretty well dead. Whereas just dead seems sort of still .. alive??
Now that E. has given herself to the house, she is free ..which leads to her fantasies about living with Theo. Anything Theo says in response will not matter. E. is deep in a fantasy, a kind of comfort, if temporary?
When she is visited by a sensation of air catching hold of her, she likes it, doesn't want to it to go. Though she watches "without surprise" when it does go.
I feel that the more dependency E. shows on Theo and Luke the more sadistic they will become towards her. Cold, withholding, all of that.
Are they trying to torture her, or is that how E. reads the situation? It seems the only sure thing we have to go on here is the way in which Jackson portrays her characters, and Theo and Luke are written as being unkind and sarcastic and all of that. So I think they really are, that their failures as human beings are not just projections of Eleanor's needs and desires but true about them.
Oct 25, 2023·edited Oct 26, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Mothers appear as haunting figures, who loom ominously in their children’s (Eleanor, Luke, Hill House’s “ghost” children?) psyches. There is almost a dark fairytale vibe to mothers – “real” mothers take on characteristics of “evil stepmothers”: “It’s all so motherly,” Luke said. “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 –”. And Eleanor’s tormented resentment at being controlled by her mother: “She knocked on the wall and called me and called me and I never woke up … I ought to have … I always did before,” leaves us with a taste of the “evil mother” who spends a lifetime shaming her child into feeling “no matter when it happened it [her mother’s death] was going to be her fault."
On the one hand, is it any wonder that Eleanor is consumed by “want[ing] to be someplace [she] belong[ed], to “not be frightened or alone anymore,” to readily embrace being held “tight and safe” by the “call she had been listening for all her life”: “Eleanor, Eleanor” resounding “inside and outside her head.” On the other hand, why denigrate mothers, so fulsomely? Is the focus on mothers - as an easy default for blame (with respect to a child’s/adult’s vulnerability, uncertainty, and weakness) - a critique of our tendencies to seek blame in others, rather than doing the complicated work of introspection?
Eleanor's overture to Theodora surprised me. She has gone from worrying, just a few days before, that she is too unreserved to making herself entirely vulnerable with this declaration. And in between she has hated Theo violently at times. This exchange seems like a counterpart to the one she has with Luke. In neither case does Eleanor seem to have any illusions about the other person's feelings, but maybe yearning gets the better of her. That being said, she seems to be losing her grip on reality here. Her placid response to Theodora's scathing comments--comparing her to a stray cat and asking if she always goes where she's not wanted--make her seem unhinged, even as she calmly announces her intention. I think she likes the idea of living in the world and needs to follow/take up with someone in order to do it. Luke is not a possibility, so that leaves Theo.
“‘A mother house,’ Luke said…” which puts me in mind of a convent. The Everett mansion was owned for a time by the Holy Cross Novitiate, as I learned from Franklin's post "The real-life Hill House?" And Mrs. Montague makes reference to a buried nun. A virgin woman. No sexual life. Walled up one way or another. That’s Eleanor. Something unseen and disembodied holds her briefly, then slips away. I guess if Eleanor is going to know any companionship or intimacy, it's not going to be human.
As Eleanor slips more and more into fantasies, I find myself drawn back to the first line: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality." Is this Eleanor's attempt to hold her sanity? Talking about living with Theo, and going back to the way she used to daydream in the first chapter about all the lives she could live, could function as a way of keeping the absolute reality of Hill House at bay. But Luke and Theo won't play along. After all their make believe, with the bullfighting and the scenes they imagine at Hill House, they don't let Eleanor make believe--because hers is too close to her actual desire? Because she does want to go home with Theodora, she does want to help in the shop, and so it's too close to reality? I don't know, but I worry about the effects of both the other people in the house, and Hill House itself, constantly trying to force Eleanor back to reality.
I’ve wondered ever since if I did wake up. If I did wake up and hear her, and if I just went back to sleep. It would have been easy, and I’ve wondered about it.” -- Did Eleanor accidentally or intentionally kill her mother. She says “But of course, no matter when it happened it was going to be my fault.” It seems that Eleanor was raised with a lot of guilt, because no matter what happened she was going to feel at fault.
I think Eleanor now feels disconnected and unmoored and lonely. She is grasping at Theo for companionship. Its sad!
“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 admired Jackson’s choice to put Eleanor into silent mode. After her abortive effort to have Theo adopt her in section 2, she says, “Theo?” once at the beginning of section 3, and then goes dark for two pages. Luke and Theo talk around her, talk for her, but she says nothing until she claims the blame for her mother’s death. It punches up her confession even more and escalates the tension in the scene. I’ve gotta remember that a character saying nothing is more powerful than one jabbering on.
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.
These sections show the chasms between the characters. Mrs M goes on about dust and no activity while Arthur gripes about the branch while our four were all in hell. And Mrs M persists in thinking of the manifestations as external and individuated not realizing that the call is coming from within the house--both to and from Eleanor.
In section 2, Eleanor reaches out to Theo and is rejected. "Lightly" says the text. And rather than being crushed and hurt, E is placid. She is used to being unwanted. How mundane and horrible. Then, there is no real gap between 2 and 3. Why make them segmented other than to emphasize the fragmentation, alienation, disintegration? It's like they're not even in the same room. Nell's only dialogue in the next section is "Theo?" It's the other two talking about her, Theo casual and cruel, Luke not descending to that level. Both talking AT Eleanor, not with her. Then a white space, then the trip down to the brook, we get back in Eleanor's head, hear a calling and approach but she finds Theo and Luke not there and something else approaching, calling, wanting. When she runs away, accuses them they have their veneer of cool politesse back on, the kind of mask, hard candy shell, that Eleanor just doesn't possess. (And is even thicker for Mrs M and Mrs Dudley!)
The rushing down the hill and calling reminded me of a story with a house on a hill in a picture, and someone calling, and places being swapped. I found it in the Shirley Jackson collection Dark Tales, "The Story We Used to Tell"
I've been getting big "swapping" vibes on this read that reminded me of that story, and also the horror movie It Follows.
Wow. That is so interesting about the sleepwalking pages. I would say that, in Eleanor’s case, DEAD DEAD and FAMILY FAMILY are, sadly, the same.
These chapters were some of the most powerful for me. From the opening sentence, (I laughed outloud) when Theo echoes Mrs. Dudley’s words about clearing at 10, in my mind, I heard her saying those words in a flat and robotic way, just like Mrs. Dudley; but I thought this could be interpreted as Theo just being sarcastic or showing that Theo is now becoming as robotic as Mrs. Dudley in the daily routines of the meals.
Eleanor can now hear everything in the house. They are in tune with one another. Unsurprisingly, Mrs.D and A heard and experienced nothing that the others did the night before.
When E. announces to Theo that she is going home with her, the scene was heartbreaking to me, with E saying “I want to be someplace where I belong.”
And when Theo finally snaps and says “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” E’s reaction is to smile “placidly” (thank you adverb!) and says “I’ve never been wanted anywhere.” Creepy isn’t the right word, but it’s as if E has accepted and surrendered to her fate as “not wanted” and is actually embracing it? Very sad.
In the next section, when Luke uses the metaphor of the furniture to being “motherly...... Which turn out out to be hard... and reject you at once,” of course I thought of E’s mother and the fact the Luke had said his mother had died--- and all the mothers and children related to HH, and then a thought occurred to me.
Suddenly, I thought of the very FIRST MOTHER for whom Hill House was built and who, tragically, was never able to live within it with her family. The first mother, Hugh Crain’s wife, died when her carriage overturned in the driveway before she even entered the house. The thought occurred to me that perhaps she is the ghost haunting Hill House? And with all the sounds of children, and the way the nursery seems to be the most haunted place in the house. Just a thought. Hmmm.
Then Theo and Luke begin speaking to one another as if E isn’t there - after Theo’s mean comment to E. about writing on the walls made me wonder if HH is turning Theo against E. I was happy to see Luke call out Theo’s cruelty.
The shepherds dancing in the Easter egg with the shepherdess in pink and blue (there’s that blue again!) is interesting and I’m trying to figure out its meaning. It’s Biblical due to it being an Easter egg and shepherds.
Then, E’s confession that she thinks it’s her fault her mother died. The symmetry of her mother banging on the walls and the same sounds they hear at HH make perfect sense. E. seems completely relieved from her guilt when Theo tells her “If it hadn’t happened you would never have come to Hill House,” because E. is then “Smiling” and walking “comfortably” (Thank you adverb) and thinks “I will not be frightened or alone any more,” and she fantasizes about her future.
The final part of the chapter was, I think, so pivotal. Eleanor is now “leading” then to the top of the hill and believes she has finally “earned” her happiness. “I’m am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy...In Will not forget this moment in my life” - There is a sense of foreboding when she hears Theo and Luke walking behind her with the grass moving “hissingly” (adverb)
Then, we return to ‘watching the unseen.’ E. sees and hears what seems to be invisible footsteps on the path, and hears her name called - and thinks it was “a call she had been listening for all her life.” It continues to call her, and then “she was held tight and safe” and says to the spirit “Don’t let me go.”
She sees the invisible footsteps walk over the water (another biblical reference ?)
It strikes me that this moment happens when she feels absolved of her guilt and finally feels “joy.”
Also, Jackson doesn’t describe the sound of the voice. She doesn’t say if it’s male or female? Maternal? A lover? All of the above?
This was truly a pivotal moment for Eleanor and the overall arc of the book, I think. Eleanor has now had physical contact with the spirit of HH, and wants it to come back.
I guess we’ll see.
I saw eleanor asking theo if she cd come live with her as a last vestige of her wish to belong somewhere on the living plane to someone. That she has such a flat response to theos response shows how futile she already knos it is. She is really already too far gone in the houses deadly and deathly embrace
Whew, that dialog in Section 2! From delusion ("I am going to follow you home" - "I can get a job, I won't get in your way." -E) to cruelty ("I am not in the habit of taking home stray cats." & Do you always go where you're not wanted?"- T) to sad resignation ("I am a kind of stray cat, aren't I?" & "I have never been wanted anywhere"- E) - to Theo's attempts to lay out the reality of their situation -- the entire conversation encapsulates the relationship between Eleanor and Theo that has developed in their short time at HH.
It surprised me how cruel Theo and Luke are in their joking. They previously, even with the Dr. Smile after she’s had a “spell” , but this seems like unnecessary digs. Aka “mean girls”. There is something in Eleanor’s being so naive and unstable that takes away the ghostliness for me. That is, there were invisible footsteps coming through the grass, well of course there were!
Finally, going back to the very start, remind me what Carrie’s deal is. I mean, Eleanor comes off like she’s not socialized at all and been locked up with mean crazy mom. What has Carrie’s role been as a supportive sibling and daughter?!
To your question, Ruth, “In the world of the novel, are the two essentially the same?”:
I think, yes.
And I also think that, perhaps—given Hyman (he would leap for Philippe Halsman, but not for fidelity), the confines of household, vacuuming, laundering, child rearing, etc—in Jackson’s life away from the novel, catching a breath to write was like gasping away the death of her spirit within family.
A part of me thinks that family, or FAMILY FAMILY is very much alive in these pages! Not dead or DEAD DEAD at all. The first word contextualizes the second. Like the difference between someone being dead and being dead dead. As family family means something that family by itself does not. As if someone might say, this is my real family, and this is my family family. Which it seems could be good or bad, depending. (Dead dead does seem pretty well dead. Whereas just dead seems sort of still .. alive??
Now that E. has given herself to the house, she is free ..which leads to her fantasies about living with Theo. Anything Theo says in response will not matter. E. is deep in a fantasy, a kind of comfort, if temporary?
When she is visited by a sensation of air catching hold of her, she likes it, doesn't want to it to go. Though she watches "without surprise" when it does go.
I feel that the more dependency E. shows on Theo and Luke the more sadistic they will become towards her. Cold, withholding, all of that.
Are they trying to torture her, or is that how E. reads the situation? It seems the only sure thing we have to go on here is the way in which Jackson portrays her characters, and Theo and Luke are written as being unkind and sarcastic and all of that. So I think they really are, that their failures as human beings are not just projections of Eleanor's needs and desires but true about them.
Mothers appear as haunting figures, who loom ominously in their children’s (Eleanor, Luke, Hill House’s “ghost” children?) psyches. There is almost a dark fairytale vibe to mothers – “real” mothers take on characteristics of “evil stepmothers”: “It’s all so motherly,” Luke said. “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 –”. And Eleanor’s tormented resentment at being controlled by her mother: “She knocked on the wall and called me and called me and I never woke up … I ought to have … I always did before,” leaves us with a taste of the “evil mother” who spends a lifetime shaming her child into feeling “no matter when it happened it [her mother’s death] was going to be her fault."
On the one hand, is it any wonder that Eleanor is consumed by “want[ing] to be someplace [she] belong[ed], to “not be frightened or alone anymore,” to readily embrace being held “tight and safe” by the “call she had been listening for all her life”: “Eleanor, Eleanor” resounding “inside and outside her head.” On the other hand, why denigrate mothers, so fulsomely? Is the focus on mothers - as an easy default for blame (with respect to a child’s/adult’s vulnerability, uncertainty, and weakness) - a critique of our tendencies to seek blame in others, rather than doing the complicated work of introspection?
Eleanor's overture to Theodora surprised me. She has gone from worrying, just a few days before, that she is too unreserved to making herself entirely vulnerable with this declaration. And in between she has hated Theo violently at times. This exchange seems like a counterpart to the one she has with Luke. In neither case does Eleanor seem to have any illusions about the other person's feelings, but maybe yearning gets the better of her. That being said, she seems to be losing her grip on reality here. Her placid response to Theodora's scathing comments--comparing her to a stray cat and asking if she always goes where she's not wanted--make her seem unhinged, even as she calmly announces her intention. I think she likes the idea of living in the world and needs to follow/take up with someone in order to do it. Luke is not a possibility, so that leaves Theo.
“‘A mother house,’ Luke said…” which puts me in mind of a convent. The Everett mansion was owned for a time by the Holy Cross Novitiate, as I learned from Franklin's post "The real-life Hill House?" And Mrs. Montague makes reference to a buried nun. A virgin woman. No sexual life. Walled up one way or another. That’s Eleanor. Something unseen and disembodied holds her briefly, then slips away. I guess if Eleanor is going to know any companionship or intimacy, it's not going to be human.
As Eleanor slips more and more into fantasies, I find myself drawn back to the first line: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality." Is this Eleanor's attempt to hold her sanity? Talking about living with Theo, and going back to the way she used to daydream in the first chapter about all the lives she could live, could function as a way of keeping the absolute reality of Hill House at bay. But Luke and Theo won't play along. After all their make believe, with the bullfighting and the scenes they imagine at Hill House, they don't let Eleanor make believe--because hers is too close to her actual desire? Because she does want to go home with Theodora, she does want to help in the shop, and so it's too close to reality? I don't know, but I worry about the effects of both the other people in the house, and Hill House itself, constantly trying to force Eleanor back to reality.