Something silly: I keep thinking of Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth the butler in the movie Clue, whenever Dr. Montague takes the floor. Something less silly: this section recalls Poe’s obsession with houses, and also his wonderful “The Man of the Crowd,” in which we can feel the loneliest reaches of obsession, where obsession itself creates an apartness. Hill House, too, can’t be claimed, absorbed, or explained--it refuses love, or it responds naturally to love having been fractured/refused within its walls. The attempt by Dr. Montague to trace its “badness” via its origin story is so satisfying to me as a reader--houses have genes too! Is it nature v nurture etc--and I love how raptly everyone listened. The house, it seems, has feelings, and crises, and to accept it as a sentient entity transforms the idea of the “haunt” into a dynamic relationship: it takes one to haunt, and one to believe in the haunting. (Much like love--is it love if it isn’t received as such?!)
I think it is love if it isn't received, just as one can be haunted and not perceive/be willing to perceive it. (Buffy's mom: I must've fallen on a barbecue fork; but I don't have a barbecue fork!)
Good morning! I am so enjoying this re read of Hill House and that it's in October. I read it last February and that was the wrong time for it.
I empathize w Dr Montague about camping. Not for me.
I do think there's definite queer coding in the older sister. It reminds me of the relationships in Dorothy L Sayers mystery w the old woman who died who had a nurse but before that had owned horses and had a live in friend, Unnatural Death. Did Jackson read Sayers?
The missing china and silver denied to the death by the younger sister is a terrific touch. This book blends the real and perhapsish very well to create its uneasy mood.
Miss Holloway in The Uninvited, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, Theo and Eleanor, the older Crain sister and her companion ... there seems to be an unrequited lesbian love theme going here?
Marveling at Jackson’s ability to sustain tension through digressions and delay. Lee Child, in his essay “A Simple Way to Create Suspense,” suggested that a stand-in for “how do you create suspense?” is “how do you make your family hungry?” and then answered, “you make them wait four hours for dinner.” That’s almost what Jackson does: she makes us wait through dinner—plus martinis and brandy. She tells us at the end of section 3 of chapter III that she’s gonna tell us, forthwith, about Hill House—then makes us wait another two pages. That takes guts and gall and some serious game.
When I first read this book, I was strangely taken with the idea of "tsaraas," the "leprous" houses in Leviticus, which I'd never heard of and which Dr. Montague mentions with an "of course you already know this" attitude. So I looked it up and it sounds to be a way of dealing with mold in houses or clothes or illness in people, although it seems to be interpreted as a kind of spiritual illness. I was reminded of this when I recently watched Archive 81, which plays with the idea of mold in a building having some kind of psychoactive properties that interacts with the occult parts of the story. I found it really interesting, and I bingewatched it before realizing that Netflix had already cancelled the show (*shakes fist at sky*).
There was really only one other little detail that jumped out at me in today's reading, which was the color of the rooms. It seems like the women were assigned rooms with more masculine colors, whereas the men have yellow and pink rooms that correspond to the colors Eleanor and Theodora were wearing. Considering the implied queerness of Theodora and the "companion" of the house's former owner, I wonder what's going on with gender here.
I'm so glad you mentioned the Leviticus/tsarass tie in. I was thinking of this as well. There are several purification rituals - but if they don't work the house must be destroyed. Perhaps Hill House's chances should have been up some time ago? Also note that mold was not about hygiene but about "maintaining the border between life and death." (Everett Fox).
That's a good detail, about houses and sickness! It reminded me that arsenic was commonly used in wallpaper in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely would have contributed to the "sick house" concept. The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum has a bit about this, if I remember correctly (or at least about other common household items that were quite toxic at the time).
the part about the colors that stood out to me was Eleanor is in the blue room and wears a red sweater, and the group ends up talking in the purple room. I have a feeling the house is going to claim her (blue + red = purple). Perhaps too far fetched of a thought to hold much weight...
"It's harder to burn down a house than you think," Luke said. Is a pretty good line, too : )
I don't know .. I am resisting the idea that the house itself is the issue. I suspect it is the people, and the house is a stand-in for their psyches. I don't know if I'm using the word 'psyche' correctly. Get rid of the house, and they'd find something else to fight about and torment one another about? Am I resisting some fundamental part of the story?
Interesting that Dr. M. can't get anyone to tell him why they all left Hill House before their stays were up. Again a sense of the ineffable.
Things would have been easier if the older sister had left a will. As apparently she didn't, how the companion triumphed in court over the younger sister is a puzzle. Jackson mentions "signing away property" - perhaps as a way to cover it.
Seems to me that the companion 'should' never have got involved with the family in the first place. People making bad choices .. what's love got to do with it, eh?
There is something distinctive in the way Jackson has posited Eleanor for us - from the beginning of the book - as our consciousness and conscience. We seem to both be her and see her from the outside. There seems to be an extra sliver of discrepancy between the two that is just enough to let in a reader's surmises, as well.
Interestingly, I am having a hard time finding anything much at all that would lead one to conclude the house is haunted, from Montague's story. Tragic ends to former occupants, yes, but those are all "normal" occurrences. Nothing aside from missing silver and dishes (easily explained away as theft, no matter how much anyone denies being responsible) hints at paranormal phenomena.
I was surprised by the vagueness in this chapter, in regard to actual "hauntedness". I've read the book 3 or 4 times before, but for some reason so much feels new to me. Perhaps the 1963 movie looms so large in my memory.
"People ... are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring."
I enjoyed that line too, though I can't help but think Jackson is poking fun of the doctor himself, with his planned magnum opus "research" study of a haunted house. Doctor, diagnose thyself!
For sure, I think the irony points in two different directions: at those who think that to appeal to the language of science is to explain away all mystery, and at the doctor, who mocks these people but is himself very much like them.
This sentence made me think - similarly to Amanda G. - that the house itself is not the primary issue, rather it is the people, struggling to find authenticity, purpose, and connection, in a world that "enchain[s]" people through layers of "normative" conformity (gendered expectations - relational and professional?). The Doctor, despite being a "man of science" readily defaults to gendered explanations for the companion's seeming "madness"; he was "more inclined to believe that she was one of those tenacious, unclever women who can hold on desperately to what they believe is their own but cannot withstand, mentally, a constant nagging persecution." An allusion to "scientifically" accepted notions of the "hysterical" female and her "naturally" vulnerable mental capabilities?
I'm fascinated by this parallelism and juxtaposition: the two young Crain daugthers who inhabited Hill House; the adult Crain daughters who fought over who would inhabit Hill House; Eleanor and Theo, adults often depicted as little girls, who are inhabiting Hill House now; and the ease with which E and T remember their childhood, Theo remembering so vividly the brick she throws through the greenhouse window and Eleanor struggling to remember the storm of stones. Jackson seems to be playing with this line between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood. Is Hill House some symbolic boundary b/w the two?
"Mrs. Dudley's good dinner and an hour's quiet conversation had evaporated the faint air of unreality and constraint; they had begun to know one another, recognize individual voices and mannerisms, faces and laughter..." Interesting that Jackson doesn't show us this. Another way she withholds information to increase tension.
“I don’t think we could leave now if we wanted to.” (p. 54) The whole tone of the book so far shifts with this line! It’s not an evaporation of their fear but may be something like an acceptance of it, a commitment to live with and around it.
I really admire Dr. Montague’s understanding that so many things cannot and will not be known, and his clarity with the group that they’re not ever going to have all of the answers they might be looking for. “...whether it was evil from its start are all questions I cannot answer” (p. 51) and even more powerfully I felt: “I will not put a name to what has no name. I don’t know.” (p. 53) It’s a very powerful instrument of trust, this admission of not knowing, of fallibility. To some extent, I felt like Eleanor at least expected to get to Hill House, meet the doctor, and have him explain everything in full. Now that this is not exactly the case, they’ll all have to find their courage to continue on amid the ifs, perhapses, maybes, and unknowns.
“Perhaps it has us now, this house, perhaps it will not let us go.” And so are we as we continue to read! Aaaaaahhhh!!
The question the Dr. cannot resolve (“The question of whether the house itself caused these problems or simply absorbed them from its unhappy inhabitants is left unresolved.”) is already asked in the story’s title, where the “of” is nicely ambiguous.
What caught my eye in this section was the theme of memory - memories of the house not necessarily accurate or complete, Eleanor's resistance in remembering what Dr Montague calls the poltergeist incident. 'I don't remember very well," Eleanor said uncertainly to the doctor.' They are on the brink of going deeper into the memories, into the psyche, into 'what has no name'.
I find myself zooming out to wonder about the setting that the house finds itself in. There are some unsettling feelings expressed by Eleanor and Theodora about the surrounding hills and the “rabbit” that frightened them. And it’s curious that Hugh Crain’s first wife died in a carriage accident on the grounds. Maybe it’s haunted ground, like the cemetery where the houses were built in the movie, “Poltergeist.” And the house itself is a channel for an older and deeper disturbance.
The house being alive is reminding me more and more of the house in the Mabel podcast, which is a great recommendation if you like strange houses and even queerer women by the way: “The house said, no more; I am staking my claim; this is my family and I have a right to them, and if they leave me they will leave bereft, for I am the house on the hill and this is my final testament.” A house’s purpose is to protect and shelter its inhabitants, to welcome them to live there and die in peace. Hugh Crain is its creator, but he ends up leaving it to die in Europe. The wife is meant to be the first member of the family to see the house, but she is brought in dead. There’s a reversal from the beginning of everything a house is meant to be.
What I find strange is that the two sisters were able to have a childhood there at all: why did the house let them survive for so long? Not much is said about their childhood there except what Eleanor and Theo hope for them, but the fact that nothing is said is strange in itself. Why did the older one return to live and die there later, and why did the younger one fight so hard to try and get it back? They get into a great deal of stress and troubles over the house later in life, but they still live full lives. I’m curious about what their childhoods must have been like in that house— in Mabel podcast, the main character who grows up in a haunted house was protected by the house so much that it was stifling, because ‘what you love protects you.’ She grows up to have a love-hate relationship with the house, but one that is so close-knit and intertwined no one else could possibly understand.
Wondering what to make of Luke and the cupids! He keeps touching the marble cupid in this chapter. Curious detail? Or is there meaning behind it, maybe even an obvious one I’m simply not getting?
Here I keep thinking of the Crain sisters and Eleanor and her sister. No love lost ultimately in either case. But the birth order is switched. It was the younger Crain sister who married and the elder who became a spinster and lived alone (until the companion), seemingly ensnared by the house the way Eleanor was by their mother. But then the younger Crain sister became obsessed with the house/objects/family from which she tried to liberate herself, whereas Eleanor's sister seems to have made a clean break. She and Eleanor are perhaps lucky they were able to sell their family home and be done with it. Except Eleanor desperately needs a home, or at least a room (as Woolf would say), of her own.
The companion's story is the most tragic. "The villagers believed--and still believe, I think--that the younger sister was defrauded of her inheritance by a scheming young woman. They did not believe that she would murder her friend, you see, but they were delighted to believe that she was dishonest, certainly because they were capable of dishonesty themselves when opportunity arose...I really think the poor girl was hated to death." Yes. Whatever the house did to her--and it was surely a tormentor too--people gave her (like Eleanor) nowhere else to go. No refuge, physical or emotional. If Hill House is all you have, your only "friend," that is clearly not good.
Something silly: I keep thinking of Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth the butler in the movie Clue, whenever Dr. Montague takes the floor. Something less silly: this section recalls Poe’s obsession with houses, and also his wonderful “The Man of the Crowd,” in which we can feel the loneliest reaches of obsession, where obsession itself creates an apartness. Hill House, too, can’t be claimed, absorbed, or explained--it refuses love, or it responds naturally to love having been fractured/refused within its walls. The attempt by Dr. Montague to trace its “badness” via its origin story is so satisfying to me as a reader--houses have genes too! Is it nature v nurture etc--and I love how raptly everyone listened. The house, it seems, has feelings, and crises, and to accept it as a sentient entity transforms the idea of the “haunt” into a dynamic relationship: it takes one to haunt, and one to believe in the haunting. (Much like love--is it love if it isn’t received as such?!)
I think it is love if it isn't received, just as one can be haunted and not perceive/be willing to perceive it. (Buffy's mom: I must've fallen on a barbecue fork; but I don't have a barbecue fork!)
Vampire Slayer reference! 👍
(a good little essay on Poe’s dilapidated houses:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-tale-of-two-houses)
Great resource!
Good morning! I am so enjoying this re read of Hill House and that it's in October. I read it last February and that was the wrong time for it.
I empathize w Dr Montague about camping. Not for me.
I do think there's definite queer coding in the older sister. It reminds me of the relationships in Dorothy L Sayers mystery w the old woman who died who had a nurse but before that had owned horses and had a live in friend, Unnatural Death. Did Jackson read Sayers?
The missing china and silver denied to the death by the younger sister is a terrific touch. This book blends the real and perhapsish very well to create its uneasy mood.
Miss Holloway in The Uninvited, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, Theo and Eleanor, the older Crain sister and her companion ... there seems to be an unrequited lesbian love theme going here?
Marveling at Jackson’s ability to sustain tension through digressions and delay. Lee Child, in his essay “A Simple Way to Create Suspense,” suggested that a stand-in for “how do you create suspense?” is “how do you make your family hungry?” and then answered, “you make them wait four hours for dinner.” That’s almost what Jackson does: she makes us wait through dinner—plus martinis and brandy. She tells us at the end of section 3 of chapter III that she’s gonna tell us, forthwith, about Hill House—then makes us wait another two pages. That takes guts and gall and some serious game.
Shirley’s got game for sure!
When I first read this book, I was strangely taken with the idea of "tsaraas," the "leprous" houses in Leviticus, which I'd never heard of and which Dr. Montague mentions with an "of course you already know this" attitude. So I looked it up and it sounds to be a way of dealing with mold in houses or clothes or illness in people, although it seems to be interpreted as a kind of spiritual illness. I was reminded of this when I recently watched Archive 81, which plays with the idea of mold in a building having some kind of psychoactive properties that interacts with the occult parts of the story. I found it really interesting, and I bingewatched it before realizing that Netflix had already cancelled the show (*shakes fist at sky*).
There was really only one other little detail that jumped out at me in today's reading, which was the color of the rooms. It seems like the women were assigned rooms with more masculine colors, whereas the men have yellow and pink rooms that correspond to the colors Eleanor and Theodora were wearing. Considering the implied queerness of Theodora and the "companion" of the house's former owner, I wonder what's going on with gender here.
Oops, that second paragraph is about tomorrow's reading. Oh well.
I'm so glad you mentioned the Leviticus/tsarass tie in. I was thinking of this as well. There are several purification rituals - but if they don't work the house must be destroyed. Perhaps Hill House's chances should have been up some time ago? Also note that mold was not about hygiene but about "maintaining the border between life and death." (Everett Fox).
Unfortunately, it's harder to burn down a house than you think.
In real life I hope that’s true. For hill house, I’m afraid you’ll be proven correct
That's a good detail, about houses and sickness! It reminded me that arsenic was commonly used in wallpaper in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely would have contributed to the "sick house" concept. The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum has a bit about this, if I remember correctly (or at least about other common household items that were quite toxic at the time).
the part about the colors that stood out to me was Eleanor is in the blue room and wears a red sweater, and the group ends up talking in the purple room. I have a feeling the house is going to claim her (blue + red = purple). Perhaps too far fetched of a thought to hold much weight...
"It's harder to burn down a house than you think," Luke said. Is a pretty good line, too : )
I don't know .. I am resisting the idea that the house itself is the issue. I suspect it is the people, and the house is a stand-in for their psyches. I don't know if I'm using the word 'psyche' correctly. Get rid of the house, and they'd find something else to fight about and torment one another about? Am I resisting some fundamental part of the story?
Interesting that Dr. M. can't get anyone to tell him why they all left Hill House before their stays were up. Again a sense of the ineffable.
Things would have been easier if the older sister had left a will. As apparently she didn't, how the companion triumphed in court over the younger sister is a puzzle. Jackson mentions "signing away property" - perhaps as a way to cover it.
Seems to me that the companion 'should' never have got involved with the family in the first place. People making bad choices .. what's love got to do with it, eh?
There is something distinctive in the way Jackson has posited Eleanor for us - from the beginning of the book - as our consciousness and conscience. We seem to both be her and see her from the outside. There seems to be an extra sliver of discrepancy between the two that is just enough to let in a reader's surmises, as well.
Interestingly, I am having a hard time finding anything much at all that would lead one to conclude the house is haunted, from Montague's story. Tragic ends to former occupants, yes, but those are all "normal" occurrences. Nothing aside from missing silver and dishes (easily explained away as theft, no matter how much anyone denies being responsible) hints at paranormal phenomena.
I pretty much agree! However having read the book once before, I will only say, we may be getting a trifle ahead of ourselves, you and I .. : )
I was surprised by the vagueness in this chapter, in regard to actual "hauntedness". I've read the book 3 or 4 times before, but for some reason so much feels new to me. Perhaps the 1963 movie looms so large in my memory.
I haven't seen the movie! Maybe I will try it after this read.
I always find with these moderated group reads that the book feels new to me and I always see so much more than I did when I read it by myself : )
"People ... are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring."
That thought rings even truer now!
I enjoyed that line too, though I can't help but think Jackson is poking fun of the doctor himself, with his planned magnum opus "research" study of a haunted house. Doctor, diagnose thyself!
For sure, I think the irony points in two different directions: at those who think that to appeal to the language of science is to explain away all mystery, and at the doctor, who mocks these people but is himself very much like them.
Agree!
This sentence made me think - similarly to Amanda G. - that the house itself is not the primary issue, rather it is the people, struggling to find authenticity, purpose, and connection, in a world that "enchain[s]" people through layers of "normative" conformity (gendered expectations - relational and professional?). The Doctor, despite being a "man of science" readily defaults to gendered explanations for the companion's seeming "madness"; he was "more inclined to believe that she was one of those tenacious, unclever women who can hold on desperately to what they believe is their own but cannot withstand, mentally, a constant nagging persecution." An allusion to "scientifically" accepted notions of the "hysterical" female and her "naturally" vulnerable mental capabilities?
I'm fascinated by this parallelism and juxtaposition: the two young Crain daugthers who inhabited Hill House; the adult Crain daughters who fought over who would inhabit Hill House; Eleanor and Theo, adults often depicted as little girls, who are inhabiting Hill House now; and the ease with which E and T remember their childhood, Theo remembering so vividly the brick she throws through the greenhouse window and Eleanor struggling to remember the storm of stones. Jackson seems to be playing with this line between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood. Is Hill House some symbolic boundary b/w the two?
Yes, I am into this idea too. There's a lot of subtext.
"Mrs. Dudley's good dinner and an hour's quiet conversation had evaporated the faint air of unreality and constraint; they had begun to know one another, recognize individual voices and mannerisms, faces and laughter..." Interesting that Jackson doesn't show us this. Another way she withholds information to increase tension.
“I don’t think we could leave now if we wanted to.” (p. 54) The whole tone of the book so far shifts with this line! It’s not an evaporation of their fear but may be something like an acceptance of it, a commitment to live with and around it.
I really admire Dr. Montague’s understanding that so many things cannot and will not be known, and his clarity with the group that they’re not ever going to have all of the answers they might be looking for. “...whether it was evil from its start are all questions I cannot answer” (p. 51) and even more powerfully I felt: “I will not put a name to what has no name. I don’t know.” (p. 53) It’s a very powerful instrument of trust, this admission of not knowing, of fallibility. To some extent, I felt like Eleanor at least expected to get to Hill House, meet the doctor, and have him explain everything in full. Now that this is not exactly the case, they’ll all have to find their courage to continue on amid the ifs, perhapses, maybes, and unknowns.
“Perhaps it has us now, this house, perhaps it will not let us go.” And so are we as we continue to read! Aaaaaahhhh!!
The question the Dr. cannot resolve (“The question of whether the house itself caused these problems or simply absorbed them from its unhappy inhabitants is left unresolved.”) is already asked in the story’s title, where the “of” is nicely ambiguous.
What caught my eye in this section was the theme of memory - memories of the house not necessarily accurate or complete, Eleanor's resistance in remembering what Dr Montague calls the poltergeist incident. 'I don't remember very well," Eleanor said uncertainly to the doctor.' They are on the brink of going deeper into the memories, into the psyche, into 'what has no name'.
I find myself zooming out to wonder about the setting that the house finds itself in. There are some unsettling feelings expressed by Eleanor and Theodora about the surrounding hills and the “rabbit” that frightened them. And it’s curious that Hugh Crain’s first wife died in a carriage accident on the grounds. Maybe it’s haunted ground, like the cemetery where the houses were built in the movie, “Poltergeist.” And the house itself is a channel for an older and deeper disturbance.
The house being alive is reminding me more and more of the house in the Mabel podcast, which is a great recommendation if you like strange houses and even queerer women by the way: “The house said, no more; I am staking my claim; this is my family and I have a right to them, and if they leave me they will leave bereft, for I am the house on the hill and this is my final testament.” A house’s purpose is to protect and shelter its inhabitants, to welcome them to live there and die in peace. Hugh Crain is its creator, but he ends up leaving it to die in Europe. The wife is meant to be the first member of the family to see the house, but she is brought in dead. There’s a reversal from the beginning of everything a house is meant to be.
What I find strange is that the two sisters were able to have a childhood there at all: why did the house let them survive for so long? Not much is said about their childhood there except what Eleanor and Theo hope for them, but the fact that nothing is said is strange in itself. Why did the older one return to live and die there later, and why did the younger one fight so hard to try and get it back? They get into a great deal of stress and troubles over the house later in life, but they still live full lives. I’m curious about what their childhoods must have been like in that house— in Mabel podcast, the main character who grows up in a haunted house was protected by the house so much that it was stifling, because ‘what you love protects you.’ She grows up to have a love-hate relationship with the house, but one that is so close-knit and intertwined no one else could possibly understand.
Wondering what to make of Luke and the cupids! He keeps touching the marble cupid in this chapter. Curious detail? Or is there meaning behind it, maybe even an obvious one I’m simply not getting?
He has a lucky piece he takes everywhere with him too. Since we only get Eleanor's internal thoughts, the others remain something of a mystery.
Here I keep thinking of the Crain sisters and Eleanor and her sister. No love lost ultimately in either case. But the birth order is switched. It was the younger Crain sister who married and the elder who became a spinster and lived alone (until the companion), seemingly ensnared by the house the way Eleanor was by their mother. But then the younger Crain sister became obsessed with the house/objects/family from which she tried to liberate herself, whereas Eleanor's sister seems to have made a clean break. She and Eleanor are perhaps lucky they were able to sell their family home and be done with it. Except Eleanor desperately needs a home, or at least a room (as Woolf would say), of her own.
The companion's story is the most tragic. "The villagers believed--and still believe, I think--that the younger sister was defrauded of her inheritance by a scheming young woman. They did not believe that she would murder her friend, you see, but they were delighted to believe that she was dishonest, certainly because they were capable of dishonesty themselves when opportunity arose...I really think the poor girl was hated to death." Yes. Whatever the house did to her--and it was surely a tormentor too--people gave her (like Eleanor) nowhere else to go. No refuge, physical or emotional. If Hill House is all you have, your only "friend," that is clearly not good.