‘Pamela’ is an interesting choice of reading matter for the doctor: sexual violence and issues of class. Suitably soporific according to the doctor - even - potentially - for young children? Makes me wonder about him. As already mentioned, the echoes of the sisters continue. Theodora sulking and then teasingly (?) declaring her jealousy of Luke’s supposed interest in Eleanor. Although Eleanor claims that the inheritance she and her sister received was not as problematic for them as it had been for the sisters we know her relationship with Carrie (Stephen King?) isn’t good. I’m also interested that the group is already splitting - the doctor and Luke with their games and the women’s seemingly light chat by the fire.
I had to smile when he said something along the lines of Richardson being good to fall asleep too. I tried reading Clarissa earlier this year and found myself quite bored by it, so I wonder if that was meant as a sassy remark.
as an English MA let me tell you PAMELA is unbelievably dull--somehow though full of sexual assault, kidnapping, etc it still manages to remain extremely high-minded and dead boring. Henry Fielding (Richardson's contemporary, who wrote TOM JONES) wrote a parody of its annoying, prissy dullness called SHAMELA. I believe there were a couple of other contemporary parodies as well. But it's considered one of the first novels, so you must still trudge through it in your 18th c lit class.
I remember learning about PAMELA and SHAMELA in college English class. Would you consider SHAMELA as being worth looking into? (Or is it something that could only be appreciated enough if really familiar with the parodied material?)
It is really interesting! An epistolary story about a young, innocent maid isolated in a house with an abusive employer she ends up marrying. There's a faint echo there of the companion who inherits Hill House and also finds herself alone and trapped in an environment not of her own making. And maybe Eleanor's own innocent nature as well, traveling to an unknown destination?
"Speaking of queer subtext: note Theodora’s laugh after Eleanor asks if she’s married." Not just a laugh, but a little silence after the question. Feels very much to me like Theo is worried she said too much, or maybe even considering for a moment if she could safely confide in Eleanor, before brushing it off with her laugh and answer.
also, I'm trying to track on this read through the way Theodora uses "we". When she talks about her and her "friend's" apartment, it's always "we", and then later this chapter, rather than having Eleanor say what color her room is, Theodora says for the both of them, "We're blue and green down here." It might be nothing but it's something I'm watching
Along with the apple pie comment, the chapter begins with the list of things that go with being Eleanor. I couldn’t quite discern the tone. Has she got a buzz on? Is this the calming self talk we give ourselves to convince that’s it’s all going to ok?
It feels like a combination of those things to me! Another element that might be at play is that Eleanor hasn't really had a chance before now to build her identity outside of her family life. Maybe in this section she's trying to build a sense of self, now that she's free (or at least free of her family)?
I read a bit of excitement or hope in this. Eleanor noticing these neutral and factual things about herself. She's not self-reproachful here, she's not resentful, nor is she fantasizing. Just thinking about what she is, and acknowledging herself as an individual. I get a bit of pride in the realization she can do something Theo can't (play bridge). But it's temporary. The moment Luke suggests she might be afraid, Eleanor slides back into the fear, the self-consciousness, and the fantasy world.
Like the others have said, I think this is Eleanor struggling with identity issues. As well as love and acceptance. She has a deep desire to be loved and accepted, but at the same time to not be captured and drowned to the point that she no longer exists as a separate entity. She has experienced her entire life up to this adventure as being only an appendage to other people's lives. She wants and needs others, but also wants and needs to be herself. (Hill House will be having a field day with her.)
I enjoyed how E's experience and thoughts here make here worlds more likeable, while Theo's confidence stumbles and her character deepens beyond the ever-sunny and carefree exterior she's shown until now. This is really zooming in, but I've gotten into looking for instances where Jackson uses a fleeting emotional description with speech or thought tags in a way i find interesting, It seems like these unassuming little descriptors have unusual layers to them. Example from prior sections: when E says something "inadequately." Here, Theodora "likes attention, Eleanor thought wisely..." Rather than just coming from without, the tags can correlate with a self-consciousness/self-appraisal, even volition in some cases. In a prior thread someone commented on how deftly Jackson creates a narrator that moves back and forth between exterior and interior when it comes to E (maybe even somewhat for the others?), and this is an example, plus somehow she also plants the idea sometimes that E knows sometimes how her comment sounds to others, may even be trying for that, but how does Jackson do it? Maybe I've gotten carried away because it's such a departure from the confines of the close third person that prevails today, yet it's not exactly omniscient.
I think this may be why Jackson’s use of adverbs works because they give us greater insights into the characters and perhaps, in Eleanor’s case, reveal her own growing self awareness.
Eleanor longs for independence, but simultaneously craves belonging: “Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought … individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me … I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and am using it and I have a place in this room.” Yet, as she settles into sleep, she giggles, “hidden deep in the bed under the blankets … [she] is glad none of the others could hear her.” Eleanor senses the “oddity” of a “house [which] should be so dreadful and yet in many respects so physically comfortable” and ruminates, enveloped by the idea that “[t]hey all saw that I was afraid” (66). Perhaps the tension between seeking independence and craving belonging is the discomfort, the unsettled nature of the house. It compels us to experience the tensions in our journeys of self-discovery, the tensions of societal, personal, relational expectation that compel navigation (push back?) in order to find, claim, and be one’s authentic self?
Jackson’s intentional, precise bits of language, peppered throughout the chapter that evoke specific qualities / tone of the characters is intriguing ---
Doctor: “anxious optimism,” “bitterness,” “firmly,” / “my wild imagination … “It watches. The house. It watches every move you make” (61-62). Is the house a stand in – a manifestation of society, his professional colleagues, the pressure to conform to their way of thinking, questioning, being?
Eleanor: “obediently,” “didn’t mean to be curious,” “disliked being touched”/ “People like answering questions about themselves, she thought; what an odd pleasure it is” (63-4).
Theodora: “(set her mouth) stubbornly,” “sullen shrug,” “coldly,” “stiff and sulky” / “Tell me how horrible I am” … her eyes shone with delight (62).
Luke: “cheerfully,” “grinned,” “held out a hand to each,” “dainty gesture of distaste” (in response to his pink room), “lucky piece he always carried with him;”
Juxtaposition of Eleanor and Theodora: “Good-humored again … [Theodora] laughed, ‘I am horrible and beastly and no one can stand me.’ / ‘You’re [Eleanor] sweet and pleasant and everyone likes you very much; Luke has fallen madly in love with you, and I am jealous’” (63).
I had to laugh at Theo saying "I'm terrible, aren't I ... I'm very selfish. Tell me how horrible I am." Reminds me of the joke "Enough about me, let's talk about you. What do *you* think about me?" But Theo does eventually go on to sincerely want to hear about Eleanor.
When Theo says "and I am jealous" is she really being truthful and just artfully disguising the reason for the jealousy?
I love that idea -- though it's also just a thing women say to each other, a way of bucking each other up. Later, when she has a deflation of self-confidence, Eleanor reminds herself of that in a way I found extremely touching:
"Did you really take care of your mother for many years?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. Her fingernails were dirty, and her hand was badly shaped and people made jokes about love because sometimes it was funny.
I love the topsy-turviness of Eleanor's sense of belonging here: the lovely intimacy of her growing relationship with Theo is so compelling, and yet at the same time her reaction to being touched is to withdraw and fixate on her fingernails being dirty. Theo describes Eleanor as being loved and desired, and Eleanor tells herself the story of her misshapen hands and the laundry labor they shouldn't have had to do for her family. Eleanor's (wonderful!) litany of details that give her individuality suddenly turns into that imaginary apartment with its cup of stars.
It's both wonderful and claustrophobic to be pinned into the "attributes belonging only to" you - to know a thing like "I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here." It's so seductive to make your own identity, and to let yourself be perceived. It's also alarming. No wonder Eleanor is skittish.
"I hardly think we'll catch anyone breaking in," Theodora said. "Anyway, the little companion used to lock her doors, and what good did it do her?"
"Suppose we want to break out?" Eleanor asked.
The doctor glanced quickly at Eleanor and then away. "I see no need for locking doors," he said quietly.
teresting to reflect on leaving or running away from Hill House as 'breaking out', especially as Eleanor has broken out of her conventional life to date to come to Hill House and she has been at times euphoric about the freedom of the journey despite being filled with misgivings about the destination. I wonder if any of the other characters are also 'breaking out' from their conventional lives.
The characters haven't yet broken in to the secret of Hill House, neither can they break out of it.
The use of 'breaking out' also makes it feel like Hill House is a prison, despite having doors that are unlocked. People are free to come and go, or are they?
When Theodora touches E's cheek with her finger: "There are lines by my eyes, Eleanor thought, and turned her face away from the fire." Such an intense and moving moment, a collision of self-consciousness, desire, and refusal.
This section made me take another look at Jackson's drawn map of Hill House that Ruth posted earlier. Wondering where the bedrooms were, I realized that the sets of parallel lines must all be doors - obvious but I just realized it! So that long stretch of hall on the right side of the map is the hall with all the bedrooms on it, E. and T. to the right and Dr. M. and Luke to the left. Is the verandah in the wrong place on the map? Shouldn't it be on the far right side instead?
The more I look at the map of the house and the room lay-out and all the doors - the less rational - my word from before - it looks.
I also realize, I must accept what Jackson says about the house - it is evil, it is watching, waiting, and - it is haunted.
OK!
I also keep thinking about Jackson's description of how Dr. M. chose his invitees to Hill House. "Consequently his letters had a certain ambiguous dignity calculated to catch at the imagination of a very special sort of reader." I was thinking about that after reading this section and the references made by Dr. M. to 18 C. novelists. He's not a man of science at all, and firmly in the bad parent mode, it would seem .. despite appearances of concern. He's lured them there to make a name for himself and satisfy his own atavistic interests ..
(I believe this is the first time I am using the word "atavistic" correctly, or at least deliberately, in a sentence, and I got it from this book! Otherwise it is one of those words I have to look up every few years. Jackson in Ch. 2: "The house had caught her with an atavistic turn in the pit of the stomach")
Re the magic cup of stars: I can't think of it without thinking of the mother of the little girl and how different she must be from Eleanor's mother. But that was not what Eleanor thought, she thought in terms of freedom and rebellion, not care and understanding.
Ah! I did wonder about the other floors. From this map I was assuming the room that says Stairs with the cloak room and telephone leads up the hall with the bedrooms off it.
What is about Eleanor’s fascination with her own extremities? “Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet.” “Eleanor thought, looking at her own hands that were badly shaped.”
I found Eleanor's fantastical description of her house the most chilling moment of the book so far. I think it's because we are not shown that Eleanor has any awareness that it is a fantasy, which Jackson could easily have supplied. I mean my stomach dropped as I read, just a brilliant turn by Jackson:
"I had to look for weeks before I found my little stone lions on each corner of the mantel, and I have a white cat and my books and records and pictures. Everything has to be exactly the way I want it, because there’s only me to use it; once I had a blue cup with stars painted on the inside; when you looked down into a cup of tea it was full of stars. I want a cup like that.”
So many great comments today! Michaela’s from this morning is top to bottom brilliant. I’d never heard of Pamela, and that is fascinating. The group beginning to split after only a few hours together too--along with the division of Theo being the only one who can’t play bridge! And that possibly being the impetus for her harsh comments about herself.
I’m thinking about Luke’s “lucky piece” on his nightstand and Chekhov’s Gun. Everything means something!
I recently read the fairytale "The Red Shoes" so when Eleanor noted her red shoes a few times, I was struck by how ominous this was. There's been mention of fairytales and enchanted places throughout the book and so I couldn't help but think Jackson put this reference to The Red Shoes deliberately, just at the point where Eleanor is beginning to weave a persona for herself, some of it real (such as in caring eleven years for her mother) and some of it not (such as the small stone lions, her white cat, her books and records that kcatmull noted earlier in this discussion).
In The Red Shoes fairytale, a little girl named Karen is adopted by a rich elderly lady who gives her whatever she wants including a pair of beautiful red shoes. The little girl can wear the red shoes whenever she likes except to church. She can only wear somber black shoes then. But she resists and wears her red shoes to church anyway. While on her way there, a soldier with a strange red beard, compliments her red shoes and then says to the shoes, "Never come off when you dance."
From then on, the little girl can't stop dancing whenever she wears the red shoes.
You can guess where this goes. Though she has plenty of other excellent and uncursed shoes, the little girl can't stop thinking about the red shoes and wears them whenever she can. When her adopted mother becomes sick, instead of caring for her, she takes her red shoes and goes to a ball. She dances all night long and afterward the ball, can't take the red shoes off. She dances everywhere, on and on, without rest. Her adopted mother soon dies and she dances at the funeral. At this point, she can't bear it anymore and begs an executioner to cut off her feet. He does after hearing her tortured story and despite being separate, her feet in the red shoes keep on dancing in front of her.
It's all very gruesome and in the end, Karen dies (supposedly she's content due to God's grace but I tend to think she's just relieved to finally get away from the horror).
I'm not exactly sure how The Red Shoes ties into this story but I think that Jackson is giving us hints and one thing for now is for sure: this house creates (or calls out) obsessions in people (the sisters fighting, the younger sister fighting the companion until she commits suicide, the companion refusing to give up the house despite the psychological pressure being too great for her to endure) just as The Red Shoes called out for obsession in their owner.
Make of this what you will! I'm curious to see in the upcoming pages how this may or may not play out.
Eleanor has a restless mind, now admiring her feet in the red sandals, now lamenting that she and her mother didn't hire a laundress to spare her hands (a searing reflection), and wondering at her description of her life. "But that's not all, she thought, astonished at herself, that doesn't tell what it was like, even if I wanted to tell; why am I talking?" Not long after, she reflects that people like answering questions about themselves and thinks, "I would answer anything right now." She has a sense of her helpless solitude even as she converses, fabricates, and sees herself through the others' eyes.
The doctor isn’t exactly conducting a double-blind experiment here, as he continually plants ideas in the heads of Eleanor, Luke and Theodora. In today’s reading he repeats, for the third time without explanation, “My own imagination, of course” after mentioning an odd occurrence. “It watches....The house. It watches every move you make.” He appears to be setting the scene to achieve the results he desires for publication.
Love this comment--a scholar looking to prove his theory, no matter what. Not double-blind but certainly more interesting to read in terms of his character.
‘Pamela’ is an interesting choice of reading matter for the doctor: sexual violence and issues of class. Suitably soporific according to the doctor - even - potentially - for young children? Makes me wonder about him. As already mentioned, the echoes of the sisters continue. Theodora sulking and then teasingly (?) declaring her jealousy of Luke’s supposed interest in Eleanor. Although Eleanor claims that the inheritance she and her sister received was not as problematic for them as it had been for the sisters we know her relationship with Carrie (Stephen King?) isn’t good. I’m also interested that the group is already splitting - the doctor and Luke with their games and the women’s seemingly light chat by the fire.
I had to smile when he said something along the lines of Richardson being good to fall asleep too. I tried reading Clarissa earlier this year and found myself quite bored by it, so I wonder if that was meant as a sassy remark.
as an English MA let me tell you PAMELA is unbelievably dull--somehow though full of sexual assault, kidnapping, etc it still manages to remain extremely high-minded and dead boring. Henry Fielding (Richardson's contemporary, who wrote TOM JONES) wrote a parody of its annoying, prissy dullness called SHAMELA. I believe there were a couple of other contemporary parodies as well. But it's considered one of the first novels, so you must still trudge through it in your 18th c lit class.
I remember learning about PAMELA and SHAMELA in college English class. Would you consider SHAMELA as being worth looking into? (Or is it something that could only be appreciated enough if really familiar with the parodied material?)
It is really interesting! An epistolary story about a young, innocent maid isolated in a house with an abusive employer she ends up marrying. There's a faint echo there of the companion who inherits Hill House and also finds herself alone and trapped in an environment not of her own making. And maybe Eleanor's own innocent nature as well, traveling to an unknown destination?
"Speaking of queer subtext: note Theodora’s laugh after Eleanor asks if she’s married." Not just a laugh, but a little silence after the question. Feels very much to me like Theo is worried she said too much, or maybe even considering for a moment if she could safely confide in Eleanor, before brushing it off with her laugh and answer.
also, I'm trying to track on this read through the way Theodora uses "we". When she talks about her and her "friend's" apartment, it's always "we", and then later this chapter, rather than having Eleanor say what color her room is, Theodora says for the both of them, "We're blue and green down here." It might be nothing but it's something I'm watching
Along with the apple pie comment, the chapter begins with the list of things that go with being Eleanor. I couldn’t quite discern the tone. Has she got a buzz on? Is this the calming self talk we give ourselves to convince that’s it’s all going to ok?
It feels like a combination of those things to me! Another element that might be at play is that Eleanor hasn't really had a chance before now to build her identity outside of her family life. Maybe in this section she's trying to build a sense of self, now that she's free (or at least free of her family)?
I read it as exactly this.
I read a bit of excitement or hope in this. Eleanor noticing these neutral and factual things about herself. She's not self-reproachful here, she's not resentful, nor is she fantasizing. Just thinking about what she is, and acknowledging herself as an individual. I get a bit of pride in the realization she can do something Theo can't (play bridge). But it's temporary. The moment Luke suggests she might be afraid, Eleanor slides back into the fear, the self-consciousness, and the fantasy world.
I believe that she is trying to convince herself that everything is going to be OK, and, even more, that she actually exists.
Like the others have said, I think this is Eleanor struggling with identity issues. As well as love and acceptance. She has a deep desire to be loved and accepted, but at the same time to not be captured and drowned to the point that she no longer exists as a separate entity. She has experienced her entire life up to this adventure as being only an appendage to other people's lives. She wants and needs others, but also wants and needs to be herself. (Hill House will be having a field day with her.)
I enjoyed how E's experience and thoughts here make here worlds more likeable, while Theo's confidence stumbles and her character deepens beyond the ever-sunny and carefree exterior she's shown until now. This is really zooming in, but I've gotten into looking for instances where Jackson uses a fleeting emotional description with speech or thought tags in a way i find interesting, It seems like these unassuming little descriptors have unusual layers to them. Example from prior sections: when E says something "inadequately." Here, Theodora "likes attention, Eleanor thought wisely..." Rather than just coming from without, the tags can correlate with a self-consciousness/self-appraisal, even volition in some cases. In a prior thread someone commented on how deftly Jackson creates a narrator that moves back and forth between exterior and interior when it comes to E (maybe even somewhat for the others?), and this is an example, plus somehow she also plants the idea sometimes that E knows sometimes how her comment sounds to others, may even be trying for that, but how does Jackson do it? Maybe I've gotten carried away because it's such a departure from the confines of the close third person that prevails today, yet it's not exactly omniscient.
I think this may be why Jackson’s use of adverbs works because they give us greater insights into the characters and perhaps, in Eleanor’s case, reveal her own growing self awareness.
Yes, well said! She redeems the put-upon adverb with her expert use.
Eleanor longs for independence, but simultaneously craves belonging: “Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought … individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me … I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and am using it and I have a place in this room.” Yet, as she settles into sleep, she giggles, “hidden deep in the bed under the blankets … [she] is glad none of the others could hear her.” Eleanor senses the “oddity” of a “house [which] should be so dreadful and yet in many respects so physically comfortable” and ruminates, enveloped by the idea that “[t]hey all saw that I was afraid” (66). Perhaps the tension between seeking independence and craving belonging is the discomfort, the unsettled nature of the house. It compels us to experience the tensions in our journeys of self-discovery, the tensions of societal, personal, relational expectation that compel navigation (push back?) in order to find, claim, and be one’s authentic self?
Jackson’s intentional, precise bits of language, peppered throughout the chapter that evoke specific qualities / tone of the characters is intriguing ---
Doctor: “anxious optimism,” “bitterness,” “firmly,” / “my wild imagination … “It watches. The house. It watches every move you make” (61-62). Is the house a stand in – a manifestation of society, his professional colleagues, the pressure to conform to their way of thinking, questioning, being?
Eleanor: “obediently,” “didn’t mean to be curious,” “disliked being touched”/ “People like answering questions about themselves, she thought; what an odd pleasure it is” (63-4).
Theodora: “(set her mouth) stubbornly,” “sullen shrug,” “coldly,” “stiff and sulky” / “Tell me how horrible I am” … her eyes shone with delight (62).
Luke: “cheerfully,” “grinned,” “held out a hand to each,” “dainty gesture of distaste” (in response to his pink room), “lucky piece he always carried with him;”
Juxtaposition of Eleanor and Theodora: “Good-humored again … [Theodora] laughed, ‘I am horrible and beastly and no one can stand me.’ / ‘You’re [Eleanor] sweet and pleasant and everyone likes you very much; Luke has fallen madly in love with you, and I am jealous’” (63).
I had to laugh at Theo saying "I'm terrible, aren't I ... I'm very selfish. Tell me how horrible I am." Reminds me of the joke "Enough about me, let's talk about you. What do *you* think about me?" But Theo does eventually go on to sincerely want to hear about Eleanor.
When Theo says "and I am jealous" is she really being truthful and just artfully disguising the reason for the jealousy?
I love that idea -- though it's also just a thing women say to each other, a way of bucking each other up. Later, when she has a deflation of self-confidence, Eleanor reminds herself of that in a way I found extremely touching:
"Did you really take care of your mother for many years?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. Her fingernails were dirty, and her hand was badly shaped and people made jokes about love because sometimes it was funny.
A great end to the line: people made jokes about love because sometimes it was funny.
I love the topsy-turviness of Eleanor's sense of belonging here: the lovely intimacy of her growing relationship with Theo is so compelling, and yet at the same time her reaction to being touched is to withdraw and fixate on her fingernails being dirty. Theo describes Eleanor as being loved and desired, and Eleanor tells herself the story of her misshapen hands and the laundry labor they shouldn't have had to do for her family. Eleanor's (wonderful!) litany of details that give her individuality suddenly turns into that imaginary apartment with its cup of stars.
It's both wonderful and claustrophobic to be pinned into the "attributes belonging only to" you - to know a thing like "I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here." It's so seductive to make your own identity, and to let yourself be perceived. It's also alarming. No wonder Eleanor is skittish.
yes, there seems to be a growing distance between Eleanor's internal life and external behavior
The passage that caught my attention today was:
"I hardly think we'll catch anyone breaking in," Theodora said. "Anyway, the little companion used to lock her doors, and what good did it do her?"
"Suppose we want to break out?" Eleanor asked.
The doctor glanced quickly at Eleanor and then away. "I see no need for locking doors," he said quietly.
teresting to reflect on leaving or running away from Hill House as 'breaking out', especially as Eleanor has broken out of her conventional life to date to come to Hill House and she has been at times euphoric about the freedom of the journey despite being filled with misgivings about the destination. I wonder if any of the other characters are also 'breaking out' from their conventional lives.
The characters haven't yet broken in to the secret of Hill House, neither can they break out of it.
The use of 'breaking out' also makes it feel like Hill House is a prison, despite having doors that are unlocked. People are free to come and go, or are they?
Or are they, indeed.
When Theodora touches E's cheek with her finger: "There are lines by my eyes, Eleanor thought, and turned her face away from the fire." Such an intense and moving moment, a collision of self-consciousness, desire, and refusal.
This section made me take another look at Jackson's drawn map of Hill House that Ruth posted earlier. Wondering where the bedrooms were, I realized that the sets of parallel lines must all be doors - obvious but I just realized it! So that long stretch of hall on the right side of the map is the hall with all the bedrooms on it, E. and T. to the right and Dr. M. and Luke to the left. Is the verandah in the wrong place on the map? Shouldn't it be on the far right side instead?
The more I look at the map of the house and the room lay-out and all the doors - the less rational - my word from before - it looks.
I also realize, I must accept what Jackson says about the house - it is evil, it is watching, waiting, and - it is haunted.
OK!
I also keep thinking about Jackson's description of how Dr. M. chose his invitees to Hill House. "Consequently his letters had a certain ambiguous dignity calculated to catch at the imagination of a very special sort of reader." I was thinking about that after reading this section and the references made by Dr. M. to 18 C. novelists. He's not a man of science at all, and firmly in the bad parent mode, it would seem .. despite appearances of concern. He's lured them there to make a name for himself and satisfy his own atavistic interests ..
(I believe this is the first time I am using the word "atavistic" correctly, or at least deliberately, in a sentence, and I got it from this book! Otherwise it is one of those words I have to look up every few years. Jackson in Ch. 2: "The house had caught her with an atavistic turn in the pit of the stomach")
Re the magic cup of stars: I can't think of it without thinking of the mother of the little girl and how different she must be from Eleanor's mother. But that was not what Eleanor thought, she thought in terms of freedom and rebellion, not care and understanding.
I should have made it clear - that was a map of the first floor! I have one of the second floor somewhere.
Ah! I did wonder about the other floors. From this map I was assuming the room that says Stairs with the cloak room and telephone leads up the hall with the bedrooms off it.
What is about Eleanor’s fascination with her own extremities? “Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet.” “Eleanor thought, looking at her own hands that were badly shaped.”
I found Eleanor's fantastical description of her house the most chilling moment of the book so far. I think it's because we are not shown that Eleanor has any awareness that it is a fantasy, which Jackson could easily have supplied. I mean my stomach dropped as I read, just a brilliant turn by Jackson:
"I had to look for weeks before I found my little stone lions on each corner of the mantel, and I have a white cat and my books and records and pictures. Everything has to be exactly the way I want it, because there’s only me to use it; once I had a blue cup with stars painted on the inside; when you looked down into a cup of tea it was full of stars. I want a cup like that.”
So many great comments today! Michaela’s from this morning is top to bottom brilliant. I’d never heard of Pamela, and that is fascinating. The group beginning to split after only a few hours together too--along with the division of Theo being the only one who can’t play bridge! And that possibly being the impetus for her harsh comments about herself.
I’m thinking about Luke’s “lucky piece” on his nightstand and Chekhov’s Gun. Everything means something!
I recently read the fairytale "The Red Shoes" so when Eleanor noted her red shoes a few times, I was struck by how ominous this was. There's been mention of fairytales and enchanted places throughout the book and so I couldn't help but think Jackson put this reference to The Red Shoes deliberately, just at the point where Eleanor is beginning to weave a persona for herself, some of it real (such as in caring eleven years for her mother) and some of it not (such as the small stone lions, her white cat, her books and records that kcatmull noted earlier in this discussion).
In The Red Shoes fairytale, a little girl named Karen is adopted by a rich elderly lady who gives her whatever she wants including a pair of beautiful red shoes. The little girl can wear the red shoes whenever she likes except to church. She can only wear somber black shoes then. But she resists and wears her red shoes to church anyway. While on her way there, a soldier with a strange red beard, compliments her red shoes and then says to the shoes, "Never come off when you dance."
From then on, the little girl can't stop dancing whenever she wears the red shoes.
You can guess where this goes. Though she has plenty of other excellent and uncursed shoes, the little girl can't stop thinking about the red shoes and wears them whenever she can. When her adopted mother becomes sick, instead of caring for her, she takes her red shoes and goes to a ball. She dances all night long and afterward the ball, can't take the red shoes off. She dances everywhere, on and on, without rest. Her adopted mother soon dies and she dances at the funeral. At this point, she can't bear it anymore and begs an executioner to cut off her feet. He does after hearing her tortured story and despite being separate, her feet in the red shoes keep on dancing in front of her.
It's all very gruesome and in the end, Karen dies (supposedly she's content due to God's grace but I tend to think she's just relieved to finally get away from the horror).
I'm not exactly sure how The Red Shoes ties into this story but I think that Jackson is giving us hints and one thing for now is for sure: this house creates (or calls out) obsessions in people (the sisters fighting, the younger sister fighting the companion until she commits suicide, the companion refusing to give up the house despite the psychological pressure being too great for her to endure) just as The Red Shoes called out for obsession in their owner.
Make of this what you will! I'm curious to see in the upcoming pages how this may or may not play out.
Thank you for this!
Eleanor has a restless mind, now admiring her feet in the red sandals, now lamenting that she and her mother didn't hire a laundress to spare her hands (a searing reflection), and wondering at her description of her life. "But that's not all, she thought, astonished at herself, that doesn't tell what it was like, even if I wanted to tell; why am I talking?" Not long after, she reflects that people like answering questions about themselves and thinks, "I would answer anything right now." She has a sense of her helpless solitude even as she converses, fabricates, and sees herself through the others' eyes.
The doctor isn’t exactly conducting a double-blind experiment here, as he continually plants ideas in the heads of Eleanor, Luke and Theodora. In today’s reading he repeats, for the third time without explanation, “My own imagination, of course” after mentioning an odd occurrence. “It watches....The house. It watches every move you make.” He appears to be setting the scene to achieve the results he desires for publication.
Love this comment--a scholar looking to prove his theory, no matter what. Not double-blind but certainly more interesting to read in terms of his character.