I feel like these first chapters have Eleanor trying to become independent but still slipping back into dependence. The roads are "her intimate friend," but they are also set out by Dr. Montague. And when she has a bad experience in Hillsdale, she says, as you noted, that next time she would listen to Dr. Montague. It's hard to break out of that kind of thinking, to realize that even when your decisions lead to negative consequences, you still have the right to continue making your own decisions.
A couple of sentences from Eleanor's journey jumped off the page: 'The journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent.' It's the journey that matters more than the destination - perhaps. Eleanor is very much going on an internal journey, seemingly aiming to exorcise internal demons from her life to date. This is a new beginning for her: 'Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself.' It feels like a time out of time. How much is the way she feels, intensely captured by Jackson, determining the way she sees Hill House and its fortress-style gates? Entering them will be taking her deep inside herself to inescapably confront those demons.
I am curious that when I read Jackson first as an adolescent, I don't remember being fearful of any of this but just fascinated and captivated, which is very much the way I feel now.
My mom grew up in a haunted house (an old farm house that had been in her family since it was built in the 1850s) so not only was it haunted, but we’re related to the ghosts.
Many stories. Very hard to nutshell in a comment. Suffice to say, many people had many sightings. Piano playing when no one was there. Someone waving from the attic window when no one was up there.
I know who several of the ghosts were, because people described what they looked like and (from one story) they literally told a small child who they were (“Arthur’s aunts,” the small child having no idea at the time that he was conversing with ghosts or that the Arthur they were referring to was not the man of the house but his father). All were siblings and had spent a lot of time there as children. One had lived there his entire adult life. Some had not died there, which I found interesting, but maybe it’s only our human perception that expects ghosts to haunt the places where they died. Or maybe they were also haunting the place where they died? I don’t know.
Also, a question for everyone: if we read the people at the diner as trying to warn Eleanor away, and Mr. Dudley as doing the same at the gate, what does it mean that they all seem to also be laughing at her? Is this an instance of an unreliable narrator, with Eleanor misreading their expressions? Or something else?
They are strange interactions. I don’t get the sense that they are laughing at her....they know something about where she is going that Eleanor doesn’t. She seems entirely anonymous to them. To me, her meekly valiant personality is perfect for a set up.
I took their attitudes as superiority over a clueless city woman, as in they know more than she does. (I wondered if the two at the diner might have been mocking the way Eleanor speaks, when they would look at each other etc.)
This section reads like the beginning of a fairy tale-a Hansel and Gretel type fairy tale with the main character leaving the relative safety of the city and venturing into the unknown countryside toward something ominous.
Completely agree! I love the oleander passage, where she imagines she is living a fairy tale, in which she, the king's daughter, returns home and releases the castle from its spell whereupon they all live happily ever after. On some level, she is still the young girl who fantasizes about the fairy tale. And yet, her adult self realizes "once the palace becomes visible and the spell is broke, the whole spell will be broken and all this countryside outside the oleanders will return to its proper form, fading away, towns and signs and cows, into a soft green picture from a fairy tale."
Thanks, Ruth, for the comments and for the link to your own experience with the catamount! I’ve had a few haunted experiences, sense-experiences perhaps more than actual hauntings, one memorable one at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I’m liking how Jackson is letting Eleanor’s drive slowly unwind. There is a sense of foreboding throughout and a weird use of the word “little.” Her "cold, little thought" of time lost, the little car, the little old lady with her little lunch, the little girl with her little cup of stars, the little house, the pretty little town....the word little becomes creepy on its own, showing something of Eleanor’s vulnerability . And Dudley with his creepy little lines. Being caretaker of Hill House was for him: “A boast, a curse, a refrain.”
I also looked up Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” to find the context for one of Jackson’s refrain: “present mirth hath present laughter.” Worth a quick read!
Fascinating noticing: the profundity of a word - "little" - that so often is simply throw away language. The power of "little" indeed! I am intrigued by the idea of "little" evoking a sense of foreboding. I was taken by the sense of sanctuary evoked (for me) when imagining Eleanor on her journey through the countryside in the car, enveloped within "a little contained world all her own." And not long after, she is "sitting in joyful loneliness" while finishing her coffee, after encouraging the little girl to "insist on [her] cup of stars" to ensure that she will escape becoming "trapped into being like everyone else." Never has "don't do it!" held such stellar wisdom. Perhaps Eleanor has discovered "a little" bravery of her own. Foreboding, or potential embrace of "joyful loneliness"?
I'm taking a ceramics class right now where I'm working on making some cups of stars. This is a great scene of realness amid all of Eleanor's daydreaming. This is one of the things that irritated me in the TV adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House": These beautiful lines were just dumped into an episode completely divorced from the emotion of the scene. In the book, Eleanor is desperate, hurting and yet hopeful, and she's moved by the sight of a strong-willed little girl that she identifies with because of her adult struggle with independence. It's a lovely and melancholy glimpse of who Eleanor might have been if she'd received some love in her life.
Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
I loved the fairy tale feel of this chapter. From Eleanor's fantasies about the lives she could be leading in the houses she passes; to the sprite-like little girl at the first restaurant; to the gatekeeper who asks several times is she's sure she wants to enter.
That last scene was especially interesting, because Eleanor answers in a way that almost reads like the magic words to break an enchantment: "My name is Eleanor Vance. I am expected in Hill House. Unlock those gates at once." Before that, we see that her car struggles on the road leading to the property, almost as if the place itself doesn't want her to enter. And when she resorts to weaving fantasies this time, trying to imagine a handsome smuggler, the process is cut short before she can get too far. The house comes into view, and it is "diseased" and "vile."
Lots of fun stuff to think about here!
Oh, and the fact that Montague is expecting her June 21, the Solstice, also with magical undertones (and the time when days will start to grow short again).
I noticed the Solstice date, too! There are so many Shakespeare references, I can’t help but think of the connection with A Midsummer Nights Dream. A time of spells. I expect this to weigh in as we read on....
Yes, and poisonous ! Eleanor asks herself, "could they be guarding something?" And then she conjures up her fantasy of wandering into a fairyland protected from the eyes of passerbys. And I'm left wondering who would plant and tend rows upon rows of poisonous trees? Ominous.
I grew up not that far from the Winchester Mystery House, which is in San Jose, CA.., but I never went there. Too scared! It shared a parking lot with a large movie theater complex, where I did go. It's just a very strange thing because it looks so out of place in the midst of busy streets and everything paved over. Perhaps it once stood alone in an orchard? I categorized it with amusement parks and thought it must be very corny, besides being scared to go inside it. Just thinking about that gave me claustrophobia.
I have never felt as if I were in a house that was haunted, but I have had weird sensations of evil from people sometimes. Once a total stranger in a grocery store. I don't know what it was but it was so strong that I almost ran outside.
I can really understand how both Ruth and her husband felt the same fear and creepiness in that same place.
There is no mistaking the fairy tale quality of the pages we've read so far. Jackson even says "fairy tale" at one point. I have been thinking about how different E. is from other fairy tale protagonists. Often they are children, and E. is a kind of child, kept at home and not allowed to have her own life or control her future, but she's also not a child and is being propelled onwards against her better judgment by the forces that have shaped her. Her quest is entirely personal. She is twice blessed (by the little lady she bumps into and the waitress in the cafe) and then cursed by the gatekeeper, whom she has an impulse to run over in her car. It is not strictly fairy tale land we are in, but maybe a warped mirror-distortion of it. Which is very creepy!
I like how you pointed out Eleanor was both cursed and blessed by the people she encounters. Even when she’s blessed, it’s with a sense of something else to it, like she’s not in on a joke everyone else can see in her.
"Corn sticks" (at least in the South) are pieces of cornbread baked in a cast iron corn stick pan—usually into little corncob shapes, but there are other designs as well.
Never read Jackson before, except for The Lottery, and my knowledge of ghosts and ghost stories is basically nonexistent, so apologies in advance. That said, does anyone else detect something almost comically degraded about this "path of incredible novelty"? Eleanor is traveling down a road "where surprises awaited--once a cow, regarding her over a fence, once an incurious dog." She can't pull her car to the side of the highway because "she would be punished if she really did." Even her fantasy of a new life seems tedious and sad, marked by dining alone, sipping elderberry wine, and caring for her stone lions--evidently the only value she holds for her fellow townspeople--as if they were living creatures. (Yeah, right,I know.) I'm struck in these passages by the limits of her imagination. She dreams of freedom, but is her idea of freedom just demanding to drink her elderberry wine from a cup of stars? (And what do larks and katydids dream of, if they dream?)
Eleanor's domestic daydreams about a home of her own lead her to Hill House, a place where dreams end and nightmares begin. It reminds me so much of Daphne Du Maurier's narrator in Rebecca: she journeys to Manderley, another great old mansion, hoping to find a new start for her confined life but encountering quite the opposite. I find the journey more heartbreaking for Eleanor rather than the narrator in Rebecca, perhaps because Eleanor is older and feels the passage of time weighing on her.
I keep wondering where Eleanor lives and where Hill House is set. At times, it feels like Europe (no doubt due in part to the path of oleanders) but the diner scene in Hillside felt very American. It's hard to say where this book resides: anywhere, somewhere, and likely Jackson intended that.
Edith Wharton's Kerfol came strongly to mind during today's read. That's another story where the main character is excited to visit a new place, rushes in with romantic ideas, and comes smack into the deep sadness and pain of the past.
I've lived in a few haunted places and what's always struck me is how deeply unsettling and oppressive it can be. Jackson's already giving this to us and I can't wait to see where she goes with it.
If yesterday was adverbs, today is adjectives. Someone else commented on the use of the word vile. The car resumes it's dogged climb, the trees are thick, oppressive, the hills unattractive, while there is a particularly vicious rock. (An interesting characterization, given both rains of stones as well as the rocks of The Lottery.)
I appreciate those who have noted the cramped and "little" nature of Eleanor's dreams.
Every time I read this book, I am strongly reminded by this section of the driving scenes in Psycho, where Marion leaves work and just drives, with her guilt and the stolen money. I've done some online searching trying to find a connection, but Hill House and Psycho were coming into creation around the same time. Hitchcock's debt to The Lottery and the creeping unease of domestic horror (deployed esp well in Rebecca, as it is in the novel--didn't we read Rebecca w APSTogether?) are noted her and there on the interwebs. But I can't find a connection between Eleanor's journey and Marion's. Perhaps I'll have to write that essay myself?
I thought exactly the same thing about the driving scene, wondered if Hitchcock stole it. Knowing that she’s driving a “stolen” car, that she’s stopping where she’s been warned not to, the old lady and her curses--all serve to sustain--even further escalate--tension that might otherwise lapse during the extended drive scene.
I was thinking the same thing about Psycho as I was reading this, and actually seeing Marion driving that car to that pulsating soundtrack as I was reading it. Also, I had reread the first chapter of Rebecca before deciding in reading HH for my October read. I must be attracted to this genre!
I like the idea of the sun as a prohibition on ghosts!
Thanks Ruth, for these biographical Jackson snippets that relate to this novel -- they deepen the reading experience.
I feel like these first chapters have Eleanor trying to become independent but still slipping back into dependence. The roads are "her intimate friend," but they are also set out by Dr. Montague. And when she has a bad experience in Hillsdale, she says, as you noted, that next time she would listen to Dr. Montague. It's hard to break out of that kind of thinking, to realize that even when your decisions lead to negative consequences, you still have the right to continue making your own decisions.
A couple of sentences from Eleanor's journey jumped off the page: 'The journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent.' It's the journey that matters more than the destination - perhaps. Eleanor is very much going on an internal journey, seemingly aiming to exorcise internal demons from her life to date. This is a new beginning for her: 'Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself.' It feels like a time out of time. How much is the way she feels, intensely captured by Jackson, determining the way she sees Hill House and its fortress-style gates? Entering them will be taking her deep inside herself to inescapably confront those demons.
I am curious that when I read Jackson first as an adolescent, I don't remember being fearful of any of this but just fascinated and captivated, which is very much the way I feel now.
The references to “time” are creepy so far. In a good way...
My mom grew up in a haunted house (an old farm house that had been in her family since it was built in the 1850s) so not only was it haunted, but we’re related to the ghosts.
Ghost relatives!
That's fascinating. Tell us more!
Many stories. Very hard to nutshell in a comment. Suffice to say, many people had many sightings. Piano playing when no one was there. Someone waving from the attic window when no one was up there.
I know who several of the ghosts were, because people described what they looked like and (from one story) they literally told a small child who they were (“Arthur’s aunts,” the small child having no idea at the time that he was conversing with ghosts or that the Arthur they were referring to was not the man of the house but his father). All were siblings and had spent a lot of time there as children. One had lived there his entire adult life. Some had not died there, which I found interesting, but maybe it’s only our human perception that expects ghosts to haunt the places where they died. Or maybe they were also haunting the place where they died? I don’t know.
Thank you--that is fascinating. I don't think I have ever had a paranormal experience, but I have a friend who remembers such things from childhood.
Also, a question for everyone: if we read the people at the diner as trying to warn Eleanor away, and Mr. Dudley as doing the same at the gate, what does it mean that they all seem to also be laughing at her? Is this an instance of an unreliable narrator, with Eleanor misreading their expressions? Or something else?
They are strange interactions. I don’t get the sense that they are laughing at her....they know something about where she is going that Eleanor doesn’t. She seems entirely anonymous to them. To me, her meekly valiant personality is perfect for a set up.
I like the description of Eleanor as 'meekly valiant'.
I took their attitudes as superiority over a clueless city woman, as in they know more than she does. (I wondered if the two at the diner might have been mocking the way Eleanor speaks, when they would look at each other etc.)
💯
This section reads like the beginning of a fairy tale-a Hansel and Gretel type fairy tale with the main character leaving the relative safety of the city and venturing into the unknown countryside toward something ominous.
Completely agree! I love the oleander passage, where she imagines she is living a fairy tale, in which she, the king's daughter, returns home and releases the castle from its spell whereupon they all live happily ever after. On some level, she is still the young girl who fantasizes about the fairy tale. And yet, her adult self realizes "once the palace becomes visible and the spell is broke, the whole spell will be broken and all this countryside outside the oleanders will return to its proper form, fading away, towns and signs and cows, into a soft green picture from a fairy tale."
And the line "She stopped for lunch after she had driven a hundred miles and one mile" has a strong fairytale quality about it!
Thanks, Ruth, for the comments and for the link to your own experience with the catamount! I’ve had a few haunted experiences, sense-experiences perhaps more than actual hauntings, one memorable one at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I’m liking how Jackson is letting Eleanor’s drive slowly unwind. There is a sense of foreboding throughout and a weird use of the word “little.” Her "cold, little thought" of time lost, the little car, the little old lady with her little lunch, the little girl with her little cup of stars, the little house, the pretty little town....the word little becomes creepy on its own, showing something of Eleanor’s vulnerability . And Dudley with his creepy little lines. Being caretaker of Hill House was for him: “A boast, a curse, a refrain.”
I also looked up Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” to find the context for one of Jackson’s refrain: “present mirth hath present laughter.” Worth a quick read!
Fascinating noticing: the profundity of a word - "little" - that so often is simply throw away language. The power of "little" indeed! I am intrigued by the idea of "little" evoking a sense of foreboding. I was taken by the sense of sanctuary evoked (for me) when imagining Eleanor on her journey through the countryside in the car, enveloped within "a little contained world all her own." And not long after, she is "sitting in joyful loneliness" while finishing her coffee, after encouraging the little girl to "insist on [her] cup of stars" to ensure that she will escape becoming "trapped into being like everyone else." Never has "don't do it!" held such stellar wisdom. Perhaps Eleanor has discovered "a little" bravery of her own. Foreboding, or potential embrace of "joyful loneliness"?
I have had that song stuck in my head for two days now, I can't get it out!
Would love to hear about the experience w Edna St Vincent Millay!
Me too!
Recommend something by Edna St. VM to read just now?
I'm taking a ceramics class right now where I'm working on making some cups of stars. This is a great scene of realness amid all of Eleanor's daydreaming. This is one of the things that irritated me in the TV adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House": These beautiful lines were just dumped into an episode completely divorced from the emotion of the scene. In the book, Eleanor is desperate, hurting and yet hopeful, and she's moved by the sight of a strong-willed little girl that she identifies with because of her adult struggle with independence. It's a lovely and melancholy glimpse of who Eleanor might have been if she'd received some love in her life.
I loved the fairy tale feel of this chapter. From Eleanor's fantasies about the lives she could be leading in the houses she passes; to the sprite-like little girl at the first restaurant; to the gatekeeper who asks several times is she's sure she wants to enter.
That last scene was especially interesting, because Eleanor answers in a way that almost reads like the magic words to break an enchantment: "My name is Eleanor Vance. I am expected in Hill House. Unlock those gates at once." Before that, we see that her car struggles on the road leading to the property, almost as if the place itself doesn't want her to enter. And when she resorts to weaving fantasies this time, trying to imagine a handsome smuggler, the process is cut short before she can get too far. The house comes into view, and it is "diseased" and "vile."
Lots of fun stuff to think about here!
Oh, and the fact that Montague is expecting her June 21, the Solstice, also with magical undertones (and the time when days will start to grow short again).
Great catch about the Solstice!
I noticed the Solstice date, too! There are so many Shakespeare references, I can’t help but think of the connection with A Midsummer Nights Dream. A time of spells. I expect this to weigh in as we read on....
I loved the description of the “splendid tended oleanders.” Splendid tended!
Yes, and poisonous ! Eleanor asks herself, "could they be guarding something?" And then she conjures up her fantasy of wandering into a fairyland protected from the eyes of passerbys. And I'm left wondering who would plant and tend rows upon rows of poisonous trees? Ominous.
I grew up not that far from the Winchester Mystery House, which is in San Jose, CA.., but I never went there. Too scared! It shared a parking lot with a large movie theater complex, where I did go. It's just a very strange thing because it looks so out of place in the midst of busy streets and everything paved over. Perhaps it once stood alone in an orchard? I categorized it with amusement parks and thought it must be very corny, besides being scared to go inside it. Just thinking about that gave me claustrophobia.
I have never felt as if I were in a house that was haunted, but I have had weird sensations of evil from people sometimes. Once a total stranger in a grocery store. I don't know what it was but it was so strong that I almost ran outside.
I can really understand how both Ruth and her husband felt the same fear and creepiness in that same place.
There is no mistaking the fairy tale quality of the pages we've read so far. Jackson even says "fairy tale" at one point. I have been thinking about how different E. is from other fairy tale protagonists. Often they are children, and E. is a kind of child, kept at home and not allowed to have her own life or control her future, but she's also not a child and is being propelled onwards against her better judgment by the forces that have shaped her. Her quest is entirely personal. She is twice blessed (by the little lady she bumps into and the waitress in the cafe) and then cursed by the gatekeeper, whom she has an impulse to run over in her car. It is not strictly fairy tale land we are in, but maybe a warped mirror-distortion of it. Which is very creepy!
I like how you pointed out Eleanor was both cursed and blessed by the people she encounters. Even when she’s blessed, it’s with a sense of something else to it, like she’s not in on a joke everyone else can see in her.
"Corn sticks" (at least in the South) are pieces of cornbread baked in a cast iron corn stick pan—usually into little corncob shapes, but there are other designs as well.
Great detail to visualize!
Never read Jackson before, except for The Lottery, and my knowledge of ghosts and ghost stories is basically nonexistent, so apologies in advance. That said, does anyone else detect something almost comically degraded about this "path of incredible novelty"? Eleanor is traveling down a road "where surprises awaited--once a cow, regarding her over a fence, once an incurious dog." She can't pull her car to the side of the highway because "she would be punished if she really did." Even her fantasy of a new life seems tedious and sad, marked by dining alone, sipping elderberry wine, and caring for her stone lions--evidently the only value she holds for her fellow townspeople--as if they were living creatures. (Yeah, right,I know.) I'm struck in these passages by the limits of her imagination. She dreams of freedom, but is her idea of freedom just demanding to drink her elderberry wine from a cup of stars? (And what do larks and katydids dream of, if they dream?)
Eleanor's domestic daydreams about a home of her own lead her to Hill House, a place where dreams end and nightmares begin. It reminds me so much of Daphne Du Maurier's narrator in Rebecca: she journeys to Manderley, another great old mansion, hoping to find a new start for her confined life but encountering quite the opposite. I find the journey more heartbreaking for Eleanor rather than the narrator in Rebecca, perhaps because Eleanor is older and feels the passage of time weighing on her.
I keep wondering where Eleanor lives and where Hill House is set. At times, it feels like Europe (no doubt due in part to the path of oleanders) but the diner scene in Hillside felt very American. It's hard to say where this book resides: anywhere, somewhere, and likely Jackson intended that.
Edith Wharton's Kerfol came strongly to mind during today's read. That's another story where the main character is excited to visit a new place, rushes in with romantic ideas, and comes smack into the deep sadness and pain of the past.
I've lived in a few haunted places and what's always struck me is how deeply unsettling and oppressive it can be. Jackson's already giving this to us and I can't wait to see where she goes with it.
Yes, definitely elements of Rebecca here.
Great connections. Like the last APStogether read, I may have to start a resource list!
Oleander is grown extensively in Northern California as a highway barrier.
Makes sense, since SJ grew up in CA
If yesterday was adverbs, today is adjectives. Someone else commented on the use of the word vile. The car resumes it's dogged climb, the trees are thick, oppressive, the hills unattractive, while there is a particularly vicious rock. (An interesting characterization, given both rains of stones as well as the rocks of The Lottery.)
I appreciate those who have noted the cramped and "little" nature of Eleanor's dreams.
Every time I read this book, I am strongly reminded by this section of the driving scenes in Psycho, where Marion leaves work and just drives, with her guilt and the stolen money. I've done some online searching trying to find a connection, but Hill House and Psycho were coming into creation around the same time. Hitchcock's debt to The Lottery and the creeping unease of domestic horror (deployed esp well in Rebecca, as it is in the novel--didn't we read Rebecca w APSTogether?) are noted her and there on the interwebs. But I can't find a connection between Eleanor's journey and Marion's. Perhaps I'll have to write that essay myself?
Such great connections. Please write the essay and let us know!
I thought exactly the same thing about the driving scene, wondered if Hitchcock stole it. Knowing that she’s driving a “stolen” car, that she’s stopping where she’s been warned not to, the old lady and her curses--all serve to sustain--even further escalate--tension that might otherwise lapse during the extended drive scene.
Love this. And isn't the big, vile house in Psycho--haunted by a dead woman manifested from Tony Perkins' psyche-- up on a hill?
Theo wishes it were atop a hill. Eleanor likes it's more hidden aspect. Their preferences show their difference in personality.
I was thinking the same thing about Psycho as I was reading this, and actually seeing Marion driving that car to that pulsating soundtrack as I was reading it. Also, I had reread the first chapter of Rebecca before deciding in reading HH for my October read. I must be attracted to this genre!
Oh wow!! This just popped into my head! Marion’s last name in Psycho is “Crane.” Spelled differently, but still- That sneaky Hitchcock!!