“What happens when you go back to a real house?” Eleanor asks Dr. Montague after his long explanation of how all the angles in Hill House are slightly off. Then she tries to clarify: “I mean—a—well—a real house?” Why doesn’t Eleanor want to recognize that Hill House is real? Think of that first sentence again. Is Eleanor the organism who can’t exist under conditions of absolute reality? “I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways,” Dr. Montague remarks. Moments later, the house literally knocks Eleanor sideways.
The domestic issues are so important to Jackson: interior decoration (not just the enormous statue, but all her attention to the finer details of wallpaper, upholstery, curtains) but most of all food. Elsewhere in her work—her early story “Like Mother Used to Make,” for instance—being a good cook is a sign of trustworthiness; being a bad cook, conversely, is a sign that something’s off with a person. Here, that too is turned on its head. Anyone who’s ever tried to make a soufflé knows that it’s not a forgiving dish: the eggs have to be beaten just right and then the whole thing has to be baked at the right temperature, in the right kind of dish, for the right amount of time. In fact, cooks often use the word “magic” in reference to making a soufflé. There’s even a popular idea that you can’t jump in the kitchen or otherwise rattle things while a soufflé is baking, or it might fall. (I have no idea if this is true—I’ve never made a soufflé, although as a child, I used to watch my stepmother do it.) And yet—as Theodora marvels—Mrs. Dudley produces what seems to be a fine soufflé in the kitchen at Hill House. Is this a sign that she, too, is in tune with the house in some ineffable way? At any rate, the place seems to have a well-equipped kitchen.
“What about your own kitchen? In your little apartment?” Theodora asks Eleanor “absently.” (Yes, Jackson’s style gives the lie to those who would have us rid our writing of all adverbs, doesn’t it? She goes for just the right ones, in just the right places.) We know that she knows Eleanor has lied to her. And it’s obviously a bad idea to lie to a clairvoyant. What will Theodora do with this information?
“It’s obviously a bad idea to lie to a clairvoyant” is obviously my favorite sentence of this discussion group, so far.
The relationship I’ve hyper-fixated on in this section is Eleanor’s with her mother. One instance that struck me was the moment the Doctor reveals the library to which Eleanor replies, “‘I can’t go in there... My mother-‘ not knowing what she wanted to tell them, and pressed herself against the wall.”
The second moment was in the kitchen. “It’s a nice kitchen... In my mother’s house the kitchen was dark and narrow, and nothing you cooked there ever had any taste or color.”
Eleanor, the narrator says in the opening chapter, “would have gone anywhere” following the abuse imposed by her mother as she cared for the sick woman and following her death.
Hill House itself has been described as sick, leprous, which parallels with Eleanor’s mother. Tending to her mother rendered her unable to have a happy moment in her adult life and unable to have anyone to love. Is the House a representation of a malevolent matriarchal figure? Does the house keep her from being able to connect to the others in the way they seem to connect to one another and even to her without her being able to reciprocate? Most every physical interaction with Theo turns sour with Eleanor’s internal feelings of dirtiness, for instance. It seems her trauma from her mother is possibly being replicated by the house in that the house has got her under its spell (almost falling off the veranda if not for Luke catching her, thinking the kitchen is lovely, great first night of sleep) which keeps her from forming true community with the others.