Oct 26, 2023·edited Oct 26, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Hi everyone! I read ahead and wrote these comments last night, and am posting them first thing this morning due to time constraints today. I’m just loving this group so much, and am so sad it’s almost over.
First off!!! When I read the macabre song that Luke sings to Theo, I knew I had read about it before, and thought about it- and remembered that SJ would sing a lullaby about a murderer to her children in her darkly humorous way. Was this it? (No, I didn’t look in Ruth’s book. I made a pact with myself I wouldn’t do that for this group)- but I did a search on You Tube to hear the song- and I found a You Tube video of SARAH JACKSON, Shirley Jackson’s daughter, SINGING THE SONG!!!!!! If Ruth already posted this, my apologies, but I’m posting it here. Enjoy 😉
These sections are short. The pacing is faster; more clipped. Like we’re being led quickly to the grand crescendo/finale, even though not a lot of action happens here.
I also found 2 versions of the song that E. hears in the center of the parlor that was a children’s circle game. I’m not sure if SJ changed the lyric to “Lover,” because all I could find was “partner.”
I’ll see if I can post one of the videos of that song.
My question regarding this is: Why does Theo want Luke to sing it to her? Are they messing with E? Is this all in E’s mind? I’m thinking we may have gone completely “unreliable narrator” at this point, if we haven’t already- Lol.
Just prior to this scene, we had the comic relief of Mrs. M nagging Dr. M.
And then after the scene with Theo and Luke, the hilarious scene with Dr. M. and Arthur in the library. It would seem Arthur needs a break from Mrs. M as well, and cannot read Dr. M’s obvious social cues to leave him alone.
MRS. DUDLEY CAN CONVERSE!!! What a revelation! And we were all so worried about her.😂. Of course, it’s with Mrs. M about the inappropriateness of the guests of opposite sexes staying at HH together. Or, since E. is listening in on this conversation, is this conversation even real?! Is E. now fantasizing about romance and sex (our guilt about it) since she had the experience of being held by the invisible presence? Did it stir up sexual or even romantic feelings in her?
Final section:
(If any of this is reality, or a vision in E’s mind at this point, who knows?)
Theo is wearing E’s (wait for it) BLUE DRESS- !!!!!!!!!
(Please Ruth!!! Help me with all the blue; especially the blue dresses that so many of SJ’s protagonist’s wear. If you missed one of my earlier posts, I am absolutely haunted by all the the blue dresses so many of SJ’s female protagonists wear in her novels and stories-I have some ideas on the earlier post.. )
But I digress.
Theo is mocking her.
She uses alliteration with “E” for “Eleanor”
“Ethereal” who
“Lives in Expectation”
E. can hear all sounds in house, even down to the the dust in attic. (Doesn’t dust come from dead skin?) But she can’t hear anything in the Library. (The one room she was too frightened or repulsed to enter)
And then, this is when, above the bickering of Dr. and Mrs. M., she hears the circle dance song, and after the line “Go forth and face your Lover,” she feels the unseen figure come to her, brush against her check, and sigh on her face as it passes by.
She’s being seduced by her Deamon Lover. I think it’s the House.
Just a side note: I mentioned in an earlier comment about the deck of Tarot cards that SJ favored. When the tower was mentioned in this reading, and I’ve noticed how often the word “Fool” has been used to describe Eleanor, I decided to look at the Major Cards of that particular Deck, and found several images that coincide with this book:
Tower
Fool
Stars
Cup (Not a major card, but has its own section of 10 cards)
Devil
Hanged Man
Hermit
Lover
Chariot
Death
Judgment
Force
Just some interesting images SJ may have played with…..or personally related to?
Oct 26, 2023·edited Oct 26, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
The use of the song “In and Out the Window” was marvelously scary. I am oldish and sang that song/played that game in school. The first and third verses here are not part of the original--and that first verse, “go walking through the valley” (you almost can’t help but add the next words from the famous psalm, walk through the “of death”)--the spirit or house or whatever is now explicitly calling her to die,. The third verse links death to the lover at the end of the journey. Aiyeeee.
I have a sense now of why Mrs. M. and Arthur are structurally necessary to the book. Their presence establishes that the house’s hauntings can be withheld from some while heard by others. That prevents us from being pushed to the assumption that Eleanor has simply (“simply”) lost her mind here. I mean of course why-not-both-dot-gif, but to me it feels like the house has zeroed in 100% on her. At the same time she becomes the poltergeist, a living ghost. It’s all so well done.
Mrs M puts Mrs D at ease because M respects D's craft, helps w the drying, and D doesn't resent Mrs M bc she isn't about the horror, she's about the "facts" and she's not afraid.
Another Buffy echo: Mrs M reminds me of that cult that worshipped and romanticized vampires and just thought they were misunderstood and ostracized.
After Theo rejects Eleanor, the house woos her, and she is so vulnerable and susceptible that it doesn't take much.
Oh and I meant to say I am so grateful to Ruth Franklin for pulling out the way SJ softens and complicates Mrs M here--she did not bother me as she did others, I found that duo pretty funny-- but this makes me like the book all the more.
The note about Laurence!! That is hilarious. I wonder also if his speech was in unconscious imitation of some teacher or headmaster whom SJ knew and found ridiculous.
For all of Mrs. Montague’s pompousness, she alone seeks Mrs. Dudley out. The rest of the household, whether due to Mrs. Dudley’s demeanor or their ready acceptance of her role as “servant,” doesn’t bother. Mrs. Montague is unafraid to visit Mrs. Dudley in her domain, to help prepare food, even. This feels significant, maybe as a way to humanize both women, and/or as a parallel to the house itself. Everyone except Eleanor waits in the thrall of Hill House. Eleanor, on the other hand, seems to commune with the house on its own terms. More broadly this could be a statement on language, accessibility, humility, even. To “enter into” that which most people would hide from.
Eleanor is delusional. Luke and Theo revel in taunting Eleanor. What a trio. And Mrs. Montague! Does she know that she is describing Eleanor when she refers to "whatever poor souls wander restlessly here. ... a lost abandoned soul, left without any helping hand."
Thanks, Ruth, for highlighting the passage in which Eleanor is communing with the house. It’s terribly pleasant--which is terribly odd. Jackson writes idyllic as well as she writes creepy. I’ve been going to school on her prose to decipher how she creates such unsettling atmosphere. Thoroughly creeped out by Chapter 5, Section 4, I did a line by line study of the section, marking repeated words and sounds, stressed and unstressed syllables, but I only understood her m.o. better when I contrasted it with this passage.
Here’s my take: when she’s writing creepy, she uses the harsher sounds of alliteration, as well as repeated ending sounds. She straight up repeats phrases or words with only slight variation until they become suffocating. She runs together long sentences with few full stops--even throwing dialogue with end punctuation inside longer sentences.
Here, she gives us regular full stops, keeps sentences to a reasonable length, repeats soft vowel sounds--and in that case, she even tends to separate them--and repeats only ending sounds rather than whole words or phrases. There are also far fewer stressed syllables. The effect is the rhythm of a trot or canter, but never the full gallop of one of her terrifying night scenes.
Anybody else catch different stuff? More eyes and different angles help when one’s trying to steal a magician’s act.
What interests me about Eleanor here is that she is eavesdropping on the others (the eaves of course a reference to the edge of a house’s roof). With hands over her mouth she waits to hear Theo and Luke talk about her - they discuss everyone but her. She listens outside the parlour door to Arthur and the doctor. Most strangely when listening to the two married women she ‘pressed against the dining-room door, stared and opened her mouth wide against the wooden panels of the door.’ Her eyes stare but she cannot see them. Her mouth is wide but she does not make a sound. The women talk directly about Theo and Luke but she is subsumed within the phrase ‘Those young people’ or is she overlooked? I remember Mrs M’s confusion over who exactly was Eleanor thinking she was Theo. Eleanor’s connection to the living, human world is becoming increasingly tenuous.
I am noticing gratefully that you have “liked” my comment on Jennifer Sears’ reference to Edna St Vincent Millay. To receive your notice this late in the day is, well, noteworthy, to say the least. It is not and could not be your intention but if I am to respond I need to say that it portends a confession and possibly, with myself at least, a creative confrontation that I had decided not to engage.
Less than halfway though the read I had decided to drop out; i.e., stop commenting though keeping on reading. I had noticed at the start, as everyone would have, that you have written a book – with a somewhat ironic title? – about the Holocaust, and are working on a book about Anne Frank. So that was one aspect of the meditation I was engaged in. Which might be put this way – though not definitively: Unless . . . , then reading Shirley Jackson’s book at this time is more than frivolous, objectionably frivolous. So, then, unless what?
When it began, I had wearily sort of decided to not pay attention to the war in Israel/Gaza. But that turned out to be entirely impossible and I shortly became fully engaged. So my thought began to go something like this: The only way I can justify devoting time and energy and integrity of self to preoccupation with this story, at this time, is if what the story is actualizing for us, as a fiction, is a depiction of the human self and the human world true to the complex psycho-social reality of our humanity as it is expressed in the brutality of war. Even illuminates the psycho-social complexity of the inevitability of warfare and of this kind of warfare, and of this war in particular. (By indirection find direction out, so to speak). Otherwise reading this story now, poring over this story as we must if we are to read it all, is frivolous, objectionably frivolous. So I decided to stop. But as I read on I began to think, yes, the story does seem to “actualize as a fiction” the psycho-social complexity” I was asking of it.
For the moment it has begun to seem to me a tremendous, and I hope in the end spiritually purgative, dose – symbolically and metaphorically depicted as the Satanic and the Daemonic – of an inevitable part of the psychic/psychological substance of our almost hopelessly self-contradicting humanity.
How odd that it should have turned out that reading Jackson’s story is not a distraction but rather an insightful, though certainly not comforting, penetration into the insoluble existential horror – insoluble, inevitable and incurable, very likely – of the very war and warfare from which I thought the book might be no more than a cheap distraction.
I don't have a specific analysis today (except that getting closer to the end makes me sad and scared for Eleanor even in the relatively peaceful moments of the book--especially since the peace itself seems false/dangerous), but I did want to comment to say I've really enjoyed reading this book with y'all this month. Hill House is one of my favorites that I've been meaning to revisit for years, and I'm glad I got to read these newsletters and everyone's great comments along with it.
I just loved listening to Shirley Jackson's daughter sing that creepy song. Someone earlier mentioned that there was a "fairy tale" vibe going on. More and more these characters seem like children. Eleanor the insecure, weakling kid who is sneaking around listening to the others. The other two kids being the taunting bullies... and those creepy kid songs. Remember that old fairy tales really are creepy! They play on some of the child's inner anxieties and fears and act as warnings to not disobey, lie, etc. Mrs. M is like an adult that comes into the room and catches the kids in the dark telling ghost stories and she flicks on the light and says stop all the nonsense and get to bed. Maybe Shirley Jackson is giving us a good ol' fairy tale... for grown ups!
I do appreciate this read a-long and all of the extra info you provide us about Jackson. I'm only now noticing with the passage about the sounds of the house which are now audible to Eleanor, that there is no reference by Jackson to darkness or sickness or evil. Maybe because there is nothing no longer unknown about the house to Eleanor (?). The sounds are in a way mundane, familiar and even sweet; Eleanor and the house are now in tune with one another and integrated.
Ah, I noticed the same things! I wonder if Mrs Dudley and Mrs Montague have a domestic connection, both presenting themselves with their husband's names. Do we even know their first names? I think not but my memory may be faulty.
I love the passage where Eleanor listens to the house. All the adverbs are gentle and soft. Eleanor's true connection is with Hill House. She has a Theo-like ability to read its mind: 'She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood aging’.
The house is her true connection. She is left out by the others. Theo and Luke never talk about Eleanor: ‘When are they going to talk about me? Eleanor wondered in the shadows’.
Hi everyone! I read ahead and wrote these comments last night, and am posting them first thing this morning due to time constraints today. I’m just loving this group so much, and am so sad it’s almost over.
First off!!! When I read the macabre song that Luke sings to Theo, I knew I had read about it before, and thought about it- and remembered that SJ would sing a lullaby about a murderer to her children in her darkly humorous way. Was this it? (No, I didn’t look in Ruth’s book. I made a pact with myself I wouldn’t do that for this group)- but I did a search on You Tube to hear the song- and I found a You Tube video of SARAH JACKSON, Shirley Jackson’s daughter, SINGING THE SONG!!!!!! If Ruth already posted this, my apologies, but I’m posting it here. Enjoy 😉
https://youtu.be/O-25GcHnOu8?si=Q0IW1bO4K8s9rMFg
These sections are short. The pacing is faster; more clipped. Like we’re being led quickly to the grand crescendo/finale, even though not a lot of action happens here.
I also found 2 versions of the song that E. hears in the center of the parlor that was a children’s circle game. I’m not sure if SJ changed the lyric to “Lover,” because all I could find was “partner.”
I’ll see if I can post one of the videos of that song.
https://youtu.be/7w5gcHVgd5s?feature=shared
My question regarding this is: Why does Theo want Luke to sing it to her? Are they messing with E? Is this all in E’s mind? I’m thinking we may have gone completely “unreliable narrator” at this point, if we haven’t already- Lol.
Just prior to this scene, we had the comic relief of Mrs. M nagging Dr. M.
And then after the scene with Theo and Luke, the hilarious scene with Dr. M. and Arthur in the library. It would seem Arthur needs a break from Mrs. M as well, and cannot read Dr. M’s obvious social cues to leave him alone.
MRS. DUDLEY CAN CONVERSE!!! What a revelation! And we were all so worried about her.😂. Of course, it’s with Mrs. M about the inappropriateness of the guests of opposite sexes staying at HH together. Or, since E. is listening in on this conversation, is this conversation even real?! Is E. now fantasizing about romance and sex (our guilt about it) since she had the experience of being held by the invisible presence? Did it stir up sexual or even romantic feelings in her?
Final section:
(If any of this is reality, or a vision in E’s mind at this point, who knows?)
Theo is wearing E’s (wait for it) BLUE DRESS- !!!!!!!!!
(Please Ruth!!! Help me with all the blue; especially the blue dresses that so many of SJ’s protagonist’s wear. If you missed one of my earlier posts, I am absolutely haunted by all the the blue dresses so many of SJ’s female protagonists wear in her novels and stories-I have some ideas on the earlier post.. )
But I digress.
Theo is mocking her.
She uses alliteration with “E” for “Eleanor”
“Ethereal” who
“Lives in Expectation”
E. can hear all sounds in house, even down to the the dust in attic. (Doesn’t dust come from dead skin?) But she can’t hear anything in the Library. (The one room she was too frightened or repulsed to enter)
And then, this is when, above the bickering of Dr. and Mrs. M., she hears the circle dance song, and after the line “Go forth and face your Lover,” she feels the unseen figure come to her, brush against her check, and sigh on her face as it passes by.
She’s being seduced by her Deamon Lover. I think it’s the House.
Just a side note: I mentioned in an earlier comment about the deck of Tarot cards that SJ favored. When the tower was mentioned in this reading, and I’ve noticed how often the word “Fool” has been used to describe Eleanor, I decided to look at the Major Cards of that particular Deck, and found several images that coincide with this book:
Tower
Fool
Stars
Cup (Not a major card, but has its own section of 10 cards)
Devil
Hanged Man
Hermit
Lover
Chariot
Death
Judgment
Force
Just some interesting images SJ may have played with…..or personally related to?
The use of the song “In and Out the Window” was marvelously scary. I am oldish and sang that song/played that game in school. The first and third verses here are not part of the original--and that first verse, “go walking through the valley” (you almost can’t help but add the next words from the famous psalm, walk through the “of death”)--the spirit or house or whatever is now explicitly calling her to die,. The third verse links death to the lover at the end of the journey. Aiyeeee.
I have a sense now of why Mrs. M. and Arthur are structurally necessary to the book. Their presence establishes that the house’s hauntings can be withheld from some while heard by others. That prevents us from being pushed to the assumption that Eleanor has simply (“simply”) lost her mind here. I mean of course why-not-both-dot-gif, but to me it feels like the house has zeroed in 100% on her. At the same time she becomes the poltergeist, a living ghost. It’s all so well done.
Mrs M puts Mrs D at ease because M respects D's craft, helps w the drying, and D doesn't resent Mrs M bc she isn't about the horror, she's about the "facts" and she's not afraid.
Another Buffy echo: Mrs M reminds me of that cult that worshipped and romanticized vampires and just thought they were misunderstood and ostracized.
After Theo rejects Eleanor, the house woos her, and she is so vulnerable and susceptible that it doesn't take much.
Oh and I meant to say I am so grateful to Ruth Franklin for pulling out the way SJ softens and complicates Mrs M here--she did not bother me as she did others, I found that duo pretty funny-- but this makes me like the book all the more.
The note about Laurence!! That is hilarious. I wonder also if his speech was in unconscious imitation of some teacher or headmaster whom SJ knew and found ridiculous.
Look to the right of the like/ share line for the three dots. Hit that for the edit option.
For all of Mrs. Montague’s pompousness, she alone seeks Mrs. Dudley out. The rest of the household, whether due to Mrs. Dudley’s demeanor or their ready acceptance of her role as “servant,” doesn’t bother. Mrs. Montague is unafraid to visit Mrs. Dudley in her domain, to help prepare food, even. This feels significant, maybe as a way to humanize both women, and/or as a parallel to the house itself. Everyone except Eleanor waits in the thrall of Hill House. Eleanor, on the other hand, seems to commune with the house on its own terms. More broadly this could be a statement on language, accessibility, humility, even. To “enter into” that which most people would hide from.
Eleanor is delusional. Luke and Theo revel in taunting Eleanor. What a trio. And Mrs. Montague! Does she know that she is describing Eleanor when she refers to "whatever poor souls wander restlessly here. ... a lost abandoned soul, left without any helping hand."
Thanks, Ruth, for highlighting the passage in which Eleanor is communing with the house. It’s terribly pleasant--which is terribly odd. Jackson writes idyllic as well as she writes creepy. I’ve been going to school on her prose to decipher how she creates such unsettling atmosphere. Thoroughly creeped out by Chapter 5, Section 4, I did a line by line study of the section, marking repeated words and sounds, stressed and unstressed syllables, but I only understood her m.o. better when I contrasted it with this passage.
Here’s my take: when she’s writing creepy, she uses the harsher sounds of alliteration, as well as repeated ending sounds. She straight up repeats phrases or words with only slight variation until they become suffocating. She runs together long sentences with few full stops--even throwing dialogue with end punctuation inside longer sentences.
Here, she gives us regular full stops, keeps sentences to a reasonable length, repeats soft vowel sounds--and in that case, she even tends to separate them--and repeats only ending sounds rather than whole words or phrases. There are also far fewer stressed syllables. The effect is the rhythm of a trot or canter, but never the full gallop of one of her terrifying night scenes.
Anybody else catch different stuff? More eyes and different angles help when one’s trying to steal a magician’s act.
What interests me about Eleanor here is that she is eavesdropping on the others (the eaves of course a reference to the edge of a house’s roof). With hands over her mouth she waits to hear Theo and Luke talk about her - they discuss everyone but her. She listens outside the parlour door to Arthur and the doctor. Most strangely when listening to the two married women she ‘pressed against the dining-room door, stared and opened her mouth wide against the wooden panels of the door.’ Her eyes stare but she cannot see them. Her mouth is wide but she does not make a sound. The women talk directly about Theo and Luke but she is subsumed within the phrase ‘Those young people’ or is she overlooked? I remember Mrs M’s confusion over who exactly was Eleanor thinking she was Theo. Eleanor’s connection to the living, human world is becoming increasingly tenuous.
Hi Ruth,
I am noticing gratefully that you have “liked” my comment on Jennifer Sears’ reference to Edna St Vincent Millay. To receive your notice this late in the day is, well, noteworthy, to say the least. It is not and could not be your intention but if I am to respond I need to say that it portends a confession and possibly, with myself at least, a creative confrontation that I had decided not to engage.
Less than halfway though the read I had decided to drop out; i.e., stop commenting though keeping on reading. I had noticed at the start, as everyone would have, that you have written a book – with a somewhat ironic title? – about the Holocaust, and are working on a book about Anne Frank. So that was one aspect of the meditation I was engaged in. Which might be put this way – though not definitively: Unless . . . , then reading Shirley Jackson’s book at this time is more than frivolous, objectionably frivolous. So, then, unless what?
When it began, I had wearily sort of decided to not pay attention to the war in Israel/Gaza. But that turned out to be entirely impossible and I shortly became fully engaged. So my thought began to go something like this: The only way I can justify devoting time and energy and integrity of self to preoccupation with this story, at this time, is if what the story is actualizing for us, as a fiction, is a depiction of the human self and the human world true to the complex psycho-social reality of our humanity as it is expressed in the brutality of war. Even illuminates the psycho-social complexity of the inevitability of warfare and of this kind of warfare, and of this war in particular. (By indirection find direction out, so to speak). Otherwise reading this story now, poring over this story as we must if we are to read it all, is frivolous, objectionably frivolous. So I decided to stop. But as I read on I began to think, yes, the story does seem to “actualize as a fiction” the psycho-social complexity” I was asking of it.
For the moment it has begun to seem to me a tremendous, and I hope in the end spiritually purgative, dose – symbolically and metaphorically depicted as the Satanic and the Daemonic – of an inevitable part of the psychic/psychological substance of our almost hopelessly self-contradicting humanity.
How odd that it should have turned out that reading Jackson’s story is not a distraction but rather an insightful, though certainly not comforting, penetration into the insoluble existential horror – insoluble, inevitable and incurable, very likely – of the very war and warfare from which I thought the book might be no more than a cheap distraction.
I don't have a specific analysis today (except that getting closer to the end makes me sad and scared for Eleanor even in the relatively peaceful moments of the book--especially since the peace itself seems false/dangerous), but I did want to comment to say I've really enjoyed reading this book with y'all this month. Hill House is one of my favorites that I've been meaning to revisit for years, and I'm glad I got to read these newsletters and everyone's great comments along with it.
Mrs. Montague is so irritating!!
It does feel like it's all coming to a head for the forthcoming section.
I too enjoyed the fact Eleanor is everywhere and unseen and then see's something none of the others can. Jackson has conveyed this perfectly.
I just loved listening to Shirley Jackson's daughter sing that creepy song. Someone earlier mentioned that there was a "fairy tale" vibe going on. More and more these characters seem like children. Eleanor the insecure, weakling kid who is sneaking around listening to the others. The other two kids being the taunting bullies... and those creepy kid songs. Remember that old fairy tales really are creepy! They play on some of the child's inner anxieties and fears and act as warnings to not disobey, lie, etc. Mrs. M is like an adult that comes into the room and catches the kids in the dark telling ghost stories and she flicks on the light and says stop all the nonsense and get to bed. Maybe Shirley Jackson is giving us a good ol' fairy tale... for grown ups!
Eleonor is becoming in tune with the house, seeing and feeling everything. Or is the house in tune with her?
I do appreciate this read a-long and all of the extra info you provide us about Jackson. I'm only now noticing with the passage about the sounds of the house which are now audible to Eleanor, that there is no reference by Jackson to darkness or sickness or evil. Maybe because there is nothing no longer unknown about the house to Eleanor (?). The sounds are in a way mundane, familiar and even sweet; Eleanor and the house are now in tune with one another and integrated.
Ah, I noticed the same things! I wonder if Mrs Dudley and Mrs Montague have a domestic connection, both presenting themselves with their husband's names. Do we even know their first names? I think not but my memory may be faulty.
I love the passage where Eleanor listens to the house. All the adverbs are gentle and soft. Eleanor's true connection is with Hill House. She has a Theo-like ability to read its mind: 'She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood aging’.
The house is her true connection. She is left out by the others. Theo and Luke never talk about Eleanor: ‘When are they going to talk about me? Eleanor wondered in the shadows’.