I was just wondering who the lover could be in that oft repeated phrase... the House occurred to me in today's reading. But her self is an intriguing possibility!
This is the first scene in the book that really took spark for me. It’s been a slow, pleasant, but subdued read up until this point -- finally we seem to have passion and threatening stakes for Eleanor. She is suddenly in a desperate conflict with both the House and with Theodora.
So many things jumped out at me in this section as well as the interesting points raised in today's post. Just a series of observations and questions....
For instance, the doctor's comments on the mind: 'One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, the conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable;... the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense. ...the mind's instinctive refuge—self-doubt—is eliminated. We cannot say, 'It was my imagination,' because three other people were there too.' The collective apprehension of a fleeting sensory experience, the ghost, has a different impact than the writing on the wall. It slips through their fingers, it's an intangible memory, a shiver along the spine. Does the physicality of the writing on the wall, with its underlying ambiguity and uncertainty of source, seem more 'real' than the shared apprehension of the ghost? Is it more or less reassuring than the memories?
Eleanor sees herself as potentially the 'public conscience of the group' and also 'outside, she thought madly, I am the one chosen, and she said quickly, beggingly, "Did I do something to attract attention?...Now I am back in the fold' Interesting use of adverbs - madly and beggingly. The anxiety of being outside the group, the ambivalent desire to attract attention yet still to be included.
'we can't afford to have you break up, you know' - this makes me think of both the individual breaking up, falling apart and also of her breaking up the group?
Eleanor and Luke's exchange also attracts attention: "you want me to go writing your name every- where? Carving your initials on trees? Writing 'Eleanor, Eleanor' on little scraps of paper?" He gave her hair a soft little pull. "I've got more sense," he said. "Behave yourself." What's going on between them?
Love everything you’ve noted here but as for your last question, I think he’s putting her off, sensing her interest in him and letting her know his own are purely brotherly. I disagree with the poster above who thinks he might be gay--I think he’s very of the period as a pampered and well but lazily educated rich boy. He’s a bit of a knockoff/blunted Peter Wimsey. Theodora on the other hand is clearly coded lesbian.
At times, I feel Hill house and it’s inhabitants represent Eleanor’s family. The house is the consuming mother who whose insatiable need for attention psychologically abuses Eleanor with guilt,.Theo would be the sister who Eleanor seems to have a love-hate relationship as well. Religion, in particular, catholicism, would say that it was a sin for even thinking negative thoughts about your family. Why did Eleanor get picked to take care of her mother? Why not the sister, she must hate her sister for that. Guilt, repressed anger?
And then there was this line: "You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace." Maybe the house is not the mother but a different kind of sister than Theo or her real sister?
Things are getting good! I was interested to note Dr M's unswerving belief in the mind, and facts, and the implication that emotions (or perhaps murky other female issues) lead us astray. Eleanor has such a deep hunger to be loved and accepted, into am group, into a whole, that she is so vulnerable to pick up (psychologically, emotionally, even physically, as with the sideways stand) the vibes the house is sending.
Eleanor notes, and I don't disagree, that Theo likes to be the center of attention, and back when the doctor was writing to recruits, he said he didn't want any center stage drama people, which Theo strikes me as.
The hair pull by Like was creepy. In that day and age it could be either read as brotherly affection, or flirtation. Now, we read both types of those as potentially abusive.
There is a weird No-Exit-ish love triangle going on between flirty, childish Luke, who can be read as asexual or gay, but not cis-het, I think, Theo the lesbian, and lonely, unloved, and romantic Eleanor. Theo is like an idealized older sister, Dr M her absent dad, and Luke either an affectionate brother or a chaste suitor, except E is jealous when she sees him attending to Theo.
Totally agree with all of this. Seeing these characters through a modern lens must be quite a contrast of how they were read when Hill House was first published.
Yesterday's reading ended with an injunction for the group to stay together, and today's reading ends with Eleanor clearly separated from the group, at least in her own mind. It's impossible to know for sure if Eleanor's assessment of Theo is correct of if her trauma is working against her, but the end result is the same.
It’s interesting you don’t pick up on any sexual tension while, to me, there is so much of it. Theo said fear comes from “knowing what we really want” and then “pressed her cheek against Eleanor's hand and Eleanor, hating the touch of her, took her hand away quickly.” She fears Theo’s touch right after Shirley wrote that! Throughout the book Eleanor fights with her emotions over how she feels about Theo touching her, something she seems to do a lot, and here they both need physical touch, very intense physical touch, to deal with the horrors of Hill House.
I’m not picking up on any lesbian undertones. Theodora accuses Luke of taking one of her stockings the night before. He replies that “a gentleman had a right to keep the favors bestowed by a lady.” Luke and Theo are enjoying evenings together, I do believe!
“No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks us where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned, our protective armor of superstition, and have no substitute defense.” 102
This is a fascinating observation about what who lose when we abandon all that is not logical or empirical. I’m reminded of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. The pre-modern world was one enchanted with meaning, where the very rocks and trees could convey messages to us and thought seemed distributed throughout the charged universe. “At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws. In place of the pneuma, the spirit-force that once infused and unified all living things, we are now left with an empty carapace of gears and levers—or, as Weber put it, “the mechanism of a world robbed of gods.”
"Abandoning a lifelong belief that to name happiness is to dissipate it, she smiled at herself in the mirror and told herself, silently, You are happy, Eleanor, you have finally been given a part of your measure of happiness." The source of her happiness is belonging - until she is singled out. Her rage at Theo is the externalization of her shame of no longer belonging.
I agree - her "source of happiness is belonging." I found the the vivid manifestation of Eleanor's somewhat manic desire to belong riveting: “… laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought” (104).
I felt, in both the opening scene of Chapter V and Dr. Montague’s monologue on the danger of ghosts, that Jackson’s subtext was mental illness. Eleanor’s morning-after, waking euphoria feels like mania. And when Theodora cruelly attacks Eleanor and, in an even crueler act, undermines Eleanor’s perceptions of the previous night’s events? That’s reminiscent of the paranoia and anxiety that comes from the sense that one cannot trust the workings of one’s own mind. A feeling that would be reinforced when Eleanor alone recognizes Theodora’s ill intentions at the end of section 1. How terribly alone Eleanor must feel when she begins to realize that she is alone here, too.
The female relationships in the story so far seem destined to head toward conflict. We have Eleanor and her mother, Theo and her roommate, the sisters who owned the house (and then the surviving sister and the companion), Eleanor and her own sister, and now Eleanor and Theo. Even Mrs. Dudley is thrown into the mix, as the group decides to send Luke to ask for coffee.
Eleanor’s internal questioning illuminates a bit of angry bemusement, as she wrestles with the tension between her desire to belong and a sense of righteous indignation at not being recognized for her moral equanimity: “Why me, she wondered, why me? Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognize” (103).
The lie that E. tells about her age, adding two years more, early in the chapter is like a reminder that E. is running on her own track all the time. Jackson calls it "obscure defiance." Does it belong with her lie about where she lives? Is it because she doesn't want to be known, not really, even as much as she wants to belong?
Theodora starts out complimenting E. on her looks, calling her "pretty" and ends with calling her "drab, timid."
Which is true?
I keep wondering what E. really looks like, whereas Theodora has been established as being reliably lovely all the time.
I think this chapter is where the lie or fantasy that they are all children is put to the test. They are adults however much they may not want to believe it or act like it. Children do not use irony to avoid saying things or to say things they don't want to say outright. Therefore I think there is sexual tension between all of them in one way or another. Luke and Theo are "discharging" theirs with their jokes, aimed at one another tho I can't see them doing anything together. Same with Luke and Eleanor, it is not possible to imagine anything happening between them. The misplaced or non-directed sexual energy is influencing the narrative somehow.
I feel like E. is right that Theodora was being her true self when she said that maybe E. had written it (to) herself. I think E. reads the situation correctly.
Theodora is the first person E. confronts when she asks, "Did you write it?"
So much for sisterhood.
I read the sentence as help Eleanor (to) come home. I think the message is not for Eleanor at all but for the others. It is a shame that E. is so sensitive to being singled out that she can't think straight which is not the same as not understanding exactly where Theodora is coming from.
The lines: ''Poltergeists are another thing altogether,'' the doctor said, his eyes resting briefly on Eleanor. ''They deal entirely with the physical world; they throw stones," - I suppose Eleanor is meant to be a kind of poltergeist phenomenon herself. Welcoming the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace, haunting it as it does her. Just like the twins from ''The Canterville Ghost".
For we know that ''Her name had turned up on Dr. Montague‟s list because one day, when she was twelve years old and her sister was eighteen, and their father had been dead for not quite a month, showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason, dropping from the ceilings rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof. '' - rather poltergeist-like activity, as the doctor mentions "Eleanor has in the past been intimately involved in poltergeist phenomena."
The doctor goes on to say ''certainly poltergeists can overshadow any more interesting manifestations. Bad ghosts drive out good... They drive out everything else, too," Hill House and Eleanor seem to be rivals, as much as they are sisters
Maybe Eleanor did write the chilling message on the wall herself, or to herself, in spite of herself.
What a contrast between Eleanor's self-conscious waking thoughts on her first morning in Hill House--"What did I do? Did I make a fool of myself?"--and her thoughts this morning: "I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine." What is the source of this joy? She yearns desperately to belong, but I don't think it's a sense of belonging that makes her happy here. She has triumphed over something. Fear, maybe. She has a made a fool of herself, and the world did not end. She is coming into her own.
The chalk writing and Eleanor's response to it and the resulting argument are all rather confusing to me, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I thought of Eleanor's mother when I read about the chalked message, that the House was trying to eject her by suggesting she was needed at home. (Her mother is dead, but Eleanor was always the person she called day and night, maybe even from beyond the grave.) I kept wondering that none of the other guests mentioned this. Then Eleanor seems upset, not about the message itself (her mother again?), but that the House knows her name and has singled her out--after just saying she wanted "to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms..." But then, it can be sobering to get what you think you want. Then she has that odd argument with Theodora, which really does sober her because she realizes how little she belongs. I fear "drab" and "timid" are really how Theo sees Eleanor, and Luke puts her in her place too. She is not one of the cool kids, and even though she seemed less concerned about this on her second morning, it's miserable to be confronted with it. She goes back to wanting to please--talking to them "beggingly" and then thinking, "I must show them that I am a good sport, after all, a good sport..." But I fear it doesn't matter. She can't really belong to this group.
Good points! In this section, Eleanor's internal conflict is really being emphasized. While she has never wanted to be the center of attention in a group (maybe because she was always made to believe that she was unworthy?) she also, deep down, is exhilarated by the feeling that the house considers her as belonging there. She would welcome the group's attention if it were an agreement that she belonged; but instead, their attention seems to be a conspiracy to push her out. I think Eleanor is fortifying her defenses against the others in this section, and she is unaware of the serious danger she may be putting herself in. In believing they are pushing her out, she is deliberately pulling away from them.
Or maybe her and her self?
I was just wondering who the lover could be in that oft repeated phrase... the House occurred to me in today's reading. But her self is an intriguing possibility!
This is the first scene in the book that really took spark for me. It’s been a slow, pleasant, but subdued read up until this point -- finally we seem to have passion and threatening stakes for Eleanor. She is suddenly in a desperate conflict with both the House and with Theodora.
Just what I was/am going to write - the book comes alive in this section for many reasons!
So many things jumped out at me in this section as well as the interesting points raised in today's post. Just a series of observations and questions....
For instance, the doctor's comments on the mind: 'One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, the conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable;... the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense. ...the mind's instinctive refuge—self-doubt—is eliminated. We cannot say, 'It was my imagination,' because three other people were there too.' The collective apprehension of a fleeting sensory experience, the ghost, has a different impact than the writing on the wall. It slips through their fingers, it's an intangible memory, a shiver along the spine. Does the physicality of the writing on the wall, with its underlying ambiguity and uncertainty of source, seem more 'real' than the shared apprehension of the ghost? Is it more or less reassuring than the memories?
Eleanor sees herself as potentially the 'public conscience of the group' and also 'outside, she thought madly, I am the one chosen, and she said quickly, beggingly, "Did I do something to attract attention?...Now I am back in the fold' Interesting use of adverbs - madly and beggingly. The anxiety of being outside the group, the ambivalent desire to attract attention yet still to be included.
'we can't afford to have you break up, you know' - this makes me think of both the individual breaking up, falling apart and also of her breaking up the group?
Eleanor and Luke's exchange also attracts attention: "you want me to go writing your name every- where? Carving your initials on trees? Writing 'Eleanor, Eleanor' on little scraps of paper?" He gave her hair a soft little pull. "I've got more sense," he said. "Behave yourself." What's going on between them?
Love everything you’ve noted here but as for your last question, I think he’s putting her off, sensing her interest in him and letting her know his own are purely brotherly. I disagree with the poster above who thinks he might be gay--I think he’s very of the period as a pampered and well but lazily educated rich boy. He’s a bit of a knockoff/blunted Peter Wimsey. Theodora on the other hand is clearly coded lesbian.
Interesting how we all bring our own lens to a text, great to share perspectives.
At times, I feel Hill house and it’s inhabitants represent Eleanor’s family. The house is the consuming mother who whose insatiable need for attention psychologically abuses Eleanor with guilt,.Theo would be the sister who Eleanor seems to have a love-hate relationship as well. Religion, in particular, catholicism, would say that it was a sin for even thinking negative thoughts about your family. Why did Eleanor get picked to take care of her mother? Why not the sister, she must hate her sister for that. Guilt, repressed anger?
there is definitely a tension throughout, and particularly with Eleanor, between her inner thoughts (voices?) and outer manifestation.
And then there was this line: "You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace." Maybe the house is not the mother but a different kind of sister than Theo or her real sister?
Could definitely be! The message on the walls are pleading Help Eleanor, Come Home. Who or whatever it is needs Eleanor.
Things are getting good! I was interested to note Dr M's unswerving belief in the mind, and facts, and the implication that emotions (or perhaps murky other female issues) lead us astray. Eleanor has such a deep hunger to be loved and accepted, into am group, into a whole, that she is so vulnerable to pick up (psychologically, emotionally, even physically, as with the sideways stand) the vibes the house is sending.
Eleanor notes, and I don't disagree, that Theo likes to be the center of attention, and back when the doctor was writing to recruits, he said he didn't want any center stage drama people, which Theo strikes me as.
The hair pull by Like was creepy. In that day and age it could be either read as brotherly affection, or flirtation. Now, we read both types of those as potentially abusive.
There is a weird No-Exit-ish love triangle going on between flirty, childish Luke, who can be read as asexual or gay, but not cis-het, I think, Theo the lesbian, and lonely, unloved, and romantic Eleanor. Theo is like an idealized older sister, Dr M her absent dad, and Luke either an affectionate brother or a chaste suitor, except E is jealous when she sees him attending to Theo.
Totally agree with all of this. Seeing these characters through a modern lens must be quite a contrast of how they were read when Hill House was first published.
Yesterday's reading ended with an injunction for the group to stay together, and today's reading ends with Eleanor clearly separated from the group, at least in her own mind. It's impossible to know for sure if Eleanor's assessment of Theo is correct of if her trauma is working against her, but the end result is the same.
It’s interesting you don’t pick up on any sexual tension while, to me, there is so much of it. Theo said fear comes from “knowing what we really want” and then “pressed her cheek against Eleanor's hand and Eleanor, hating the touch of her, took her hand away quickly.” She fears Theo’s touch right after Shirley wrote that! Throughout the book Eleanor fights with her emotions over how she feels about Theo touching her, something she seems to do a lot, and here they both need physical touch, very intense physical touch, to deal with the horrors of Hill House.
I’m not picking up on any lesbian undertones. Theodora accuses Luke of taking one of her stockings the night before. He replies that “a gentleman had a right to keep the favors bestowed by a lady.” Luke and Theo are enjoying evenings together, I do believe!
“No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks us where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned, our protective armor of superstition, and have no substitute defense.” 102
This is a fascinating observation about what who lose when we abandon all that is not logical or empirical. I’m reminded of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. The pre-modern world was one enchanted with meaning, where the very rocks and trees could convey messages to us and thought seemed distributed throughout the charged universe. “At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws. In place of the pneuma, the spirit-force that once infused and unified all living things, we are now left with an empty carapace of gears and levers—or, as Weber put it, “the mechanism of a world robbed of gods.”
O'Gieblyn's book sounds intriguing. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Lots of great comments here.
I noticed again that the Dr mentioned about Eleanor going home again... Maybe she is already home?
"Abandoning a lifelong belief that to name happiness is to dissipate it, she smiled at herself in the mirror and told herself, silently, You are happy, Eleanor, you have finally been given a part of your measure of happiness." The source of her happiness is belonging - until she is singled out. Her rage at Theo is the externalization of her shame of no longer belonging.
I agree - her "source of happiness is belonging." I found the the vivid manifestation of Eleanor's somewhat manic desire to belong riveting: “… laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought” (104).
Our Eleanor is needy, without self esteem, lacking in confidence, naïve and lonely.
I felt, in both the opening scene of Chapter V and Dr. Montague’s monologue on the danger of ghosts, that Jackson’s subtext was mental illness. Eleanor’s morning-after, waking euphoria feels like mania. And when Theodora cruelly attacks Eleanor and, in an even crueler act, undermines Eleanor’s perceptions of the previous night’s events? That’s reminiscent of the paranoia and anxiety that comes from the sense that one cannot trust the workings of one’s own mind. A feeling that would be reinforced when Eleanor alone recognizes Theodora’s ill intentions at the end of section 1. How terribly alone Eleanor must feel when she begins to realize that she is alone here, too.
The female relationships in the story so far seem destined to head toward conflict. We have Eleanor and her mother, Theo and her roommate, the sisters who owned the house (and then the surviving sister and the companion), Eleanor and her own sister, and now Eleanor and Theo. Even Mrs. Dudley is thrown into the mix, as the group decides to send Luke to ask for coffee.
Eleanor’s internal questioning illuminates a bit of angry bemusement, as she wrestles with the tension between her desire to belong and a sense of righteous indignation at not being recognized for her moral equanimity: “Why me, she wondered, why me? Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognize” (103).
The lie that E. tells about her age, adding two years more, early in the chapter is like a reminder that E. is running on her own track all the time. Jackson calls it "obscure defiance." Does it belong with her lie about where she lives? Is it because she doesn't want to be known, not really, even as much as she wants to belong?
Theodora starts out complimenting E. on her looks, calling her "pretty" and ends with calling her "drab, timid."
Which is true?
I keep wondering what E. really looks like, whereas Theodora has been established as being reliably lovely all the time.
I think this chapter is where the lie or fantasy that they are all children is put to the test. They are adults however much they may not want to believe it or act like it. Children do not use irony to avoid saying things or to say things they don't want to say outright. Therefore I think there is sexual tension between all of them in one way or another. Luke and Theo are "discharging" theirs with their jokes, aimed at one another tho I can't see them doing anything together. Same with Luke and Eleanor, it is not possible to imagine anything happening between them. The misplaced or non-directed sexual energy is influencing the narrative somehow.
I feel like E. is right that Theodora was being her true self when she said that maybe E. had written it (to) herself. I think E. reads the situation correctly.
Theodora is the first person E. confronts when she asks, "Did you write it?"
So much for sisterhood.
I read the sentence as help Eleanor (to) come home. I think the message is not for Eleanor at all but for the others. It is a shame that E. is so sensitive to being singled out that she can't think straight which is not the same as not understanding exactly where Theodora is coming from.
The lines: ''Poltergeists are another thing altogether,'' the doctor said, his eyes resting briefly on Eleanor. ''They deal entirely with the physical world; they throw stones," - I suppose Eleanor is meant to be a kind of poltergeist phenomenon herself. Welcoming the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace, haunting it as it does her. Just like the twins from ''The Canterville Ghost".
For we know that ''Her name had turned up on Dr. Montague‟s list because one day, when she was twelve years old and her sister was eighteen, and their father had been dead for not quite a month, showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason, dropping from the ceilings rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof. '' - rather poltergeist-like activity, as the doctor mentions "Eleanor has in the past been intimately involved in poltergeist phenomena."
The doctor goes on to say ''certainly poltergeists can overshadow any more interesting manifestations. Bad ghosts drive out good... They drive out everything else, too," Hill House and Eleanor seem to be rivals, as much as they are sisters
Maybe Eleanor did write the chilling message on the wall herself, or to herself, in spite of herself.
What a contrast between Eleanor's self-conscious waking thoughts on her first morning in Hill House--"What did I do? Did I make a fool of myself?"--and her thoughts this morning: "I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine." What is the source of this joy? She yearns desperately to belong, but I don't think it's a sense of belonging that makes her happy here. She has triumphed over something. Fear, maybe. She has a made a fool of herself, and the world did not end. She is coming into her own.
The chalk writing and Eleanor's response to it and the resulting argument are all rather confusing to me, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I thought of Eleanor's mother when I read about the chalked message, that the House was trying to eject her by suggesting she was needed at home. (Her mother is dead, but Eleanor was always the person she called day and night, maybe even from beyond the grave.) I kept wondering that none of the other guests mentioned this. Then Eleanor seems upset, not about the message itself (her mother again?), but that the House knows her name and has singled her out--after just saying she wanted "to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms..." But then, it can be sobering to get what you think you want. Then she has that odd argument with Theodora, which really does sober her because she realizes how little she belongs. I fear "drab" and "timid" are really how Theo sees Eleanor, and Luke puts her in her place too. She is not one of the cool kids, and even though she seemed less concerned about this on her second morning, it's miserable to be confronted with it. She goes back to wanting to please--talking to them "beggingly" and then thinking, "I must show them that I am a good sport, after all, a good sport..." But I fear it doesn't matter. She can't really belong to this group.
Good points! In this section, Eleanor's internal conflict is really being emphasized. While she has never wanted to be the center of attention in a group (maybe because she was always made to believe that she was unworthy?) she also, deep down, is exhilarated by the feeling that the house considers her as belonging there. She would welcome the group's attention if it were an agreement that she belonged; but instead, their attention seems to be a conspiracy to push her out. I think Eleanor is fortifying her defenses against the others in this section, and she is unaware of the serious danger she may be putting herself in. In believing they are pushing her out, she is deliberately pulling away from them.