The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Day 10
Chapter 4, Part 6
Before we get to the actual haunting, I want to pause for just a moment to consider the novel’s pacing. (See what I did there?) We’re just over halfway through: the end of the fourth of nine chapters. Jackson has spent all this time setting the scene, preparing the characters—and the reader—for the second half of the book. I was surprised by some of the comments about the slow pace—my own feeling is that Hill House is a page-turner. But readers who are expecting something more like Stephen King probably find it harder to wait this long for bona fide supernatural happenings to start.
Structurally, the book is interesting in a way I hadn’t really picked up on before sketching out the reading schedule for this book club. Longer chapters with multiple parts—up to eight parts in chapter eight—are interspersed with shorter chapters that may have only one part (chapter two, three, six) or a few (chapter five, seven). From a craft standpoint, it’s an interesting choice, also, to delay the first supernatural manifestation until the end of a long chapter rather than using it to open the next one.
We now see just how firmly Eleanor is stuck in the world of her mother. “I’m here, what is it?” Eleanor says at first to Theodora, in the tone she must have used when her mother called her during the night. And then she repeats “What is it?” in a whisper. I love the way Jackson uses an identical phrase in two such different ways.
“That’s all,” she says in response to Theodora telling her something is knocking on the doors. That’s all? Something unknown—something unseen—is banging on the doors, and Eleanor’s first reaction is relief: that’s all. Because whatever it is, it’s not her mother.
Again, to show fear, Jackson shows us the characters huddling closer together. Against the fear, but also against the cold that “starts in your stomach and goes in waves around and up and down again like something alive.”
And again, laughter is the defense against fear.
“Someone knocked on the door with a cannon ball and then tried to get in and eat us, and started laughing its head off when we wouldn’t open the door. But nothing really out of the way,” Theodora says.
In essence, the same story as the one we just read—condensed and ironized for public consumption.
What do you make of the thing Dr. Montague saw—or thinks he saw—run down the hall? Or his idea that the house wants to separate them?
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The hall seems a haunted locus, la passage between the living and the dead. I was reminded that the etymology of hill is probably connected to the Sanskrit for skull. As Emily Dickinson wrote:
One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors surpassing
Material Place—
Far safer, of a Midnight—meeting
External Ghost—
Than an Interior—confronting—
That cooler—Host—
Far safer, through an Abbey—gallop—
The Stones a’chase—
Than moonless—One’s A’self encounter—
In lonesome place—
Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed—
Should startle—most—
Assassin—hid in Our Apartment—
Be Horror’s least—
The Prudent—carries a Revolver—
He bolts the Door,
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near—
What jumped out at me in this reading was that Eleanor seems more in charge than she ever has before. She's the one who rushes to Theodora's aid; she challenges the ghost/whatever it is; she grabs the blanket and robe to warm them up. She's never seemed so competent. Is it because Eleanor is used to nighttime interruptions, as implied by her calling to her mother as she wakes up? Or is there more to it? I'll return to this in later parts of the book, but this is what I'm chewing on for now.
The doctor seems less scientific in this midnight adventure, suggesting finally that there is something that has intent; suddenly, here, he becomes more willing to approach something like a definition for the haunting. In yesterday's reading, he had a speech that I found a little bit spooky:
"I think we are all incredibly silly to stay. I think that an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defense, and that is running away."
In both parts he sounds ominous, but previously he only talked about the effect of Hill House on a person's mind. In today's reading, he suddenly comments on the supernatural, and he does so with a warning.