The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Day 1

Chapter 1, Part 1-3

“Journeys end in lovers meeting.” This evocative line from Twelfth Night recurs throughout The Haunting of Hill House. But today our journey into this novel begins, with its deservedly classic first paragraph:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

That enigmatic first sentence seems as if it might have landed on the page from some other book. What does it have to do with the description of the house that follows? The fact that Hill House is “not sane” tells us that the circumstances that exist there, supernatural though they may appear, in fact constitute “absolute reality,” or at least some form of it. Those who are susceptible may find inside not a haunting from another world but a confrontation with the reality of their psyches.

In this great piece, language guru Benjamin Dreyer elaborates on some of the finer points of Jackson’s style in this paragraph. What stands out to me is all the alliteration (the repetition of the first letter or sound in a word) and assonance (the echoing of vowel sounds). “Within / walls / whatever / walked”; “floors / doors”; “silence / steadily / stone.” The rhythm, too, is stately but soothing, almost like a lullaby. Just look at how that phrase “doors were sensibly shut” closes itself like a door at the end.

And, of course, that final comma. It’s a nongrammatical comma, signaling a breath taken rather than a turn in the sentence. And it’s absolutely essential.

What do you hear in this paragraph? Let me know in the comments.

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The house, as we’ll soon see, is a living force that adapts to its inhabitants and responds to their personalities and their histories. Here we’re introduced to the figures who are about to take up residence there. Dr. Montague, the “man of science,” sees himself as a modern-day version of the nineteenth-century ghost hunters who investigated places like Ballechin House—an estate in Scotland where a spiritualist once claimed to have been in regular contact with a spirit, using a Ouija board. (That method will turn out to be rather indirect for whatever is haunting Hill House.)

Doesn’t it seem odd that the doctor is able to drum up so little enthusiasm among those he invites to participate in his experiment? If this were a reality show, the applications would be through the roof. In fact, I’m a little surprised that no one has yet made a haunted house reality show. (Have they?)

Ghost-hunting was in the newspapers as Jackson began working on Hill House: in 1958, the New York Times covered incidents of suspected poltergeist activity in a home on Long Island. Out of nowhere, screw tops were suddenly popping off bottles, making a huge mess. Jackson clipped stories about the case from the newspaper and saved them in a scrapbook she kept for Hill House inspiration.

I suspect Jackson may have been even more inspired by a book called Haunted People, written by two psychical researchers of her time, Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor. Jackson wrote to Fodor to congratulate him on the book, which attempted to find psychological explanations for phenomena that appeared to be supernatural. The book includes a section on poltergeists, which, Carrington and Fodor argue, often manifest in the vicinity of children around the age of puberty. “It is a legitimate inference that the life force which blossoming sexual powers represent is finding an abnormal outlet,” the authors write. The episodes in Long Island tended to take place when the twelve-year-old son of the family was at home.

Jackson’s comment on this is classic. “I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children,” she wrote in an essay called “The Ghosts of Loiret.”

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The majority of poltergeist incidents that Carrington and Fodor examine in Haunted People have one element in common: a shower of stones. This, of course, is precisely what happens outside the house of Eleanor, age twelve, shortly after her father’s death. It’s notable that Eleanor is less upset by the stones than by the hostile reaction of the neighbors and her mother’s resulting paranoia. As a New York City transplant plunked down in small-town Vermont, Jackson, too, suffered from her neighbors’ hostility, eventually developing agoraphobia so disabling that she was unable to leave her house.

“The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister.”

This tells us so much about Eleanor’s miserable family life, which we’ll get a glimpse of in the next section: her controlling sister and brother-in-law, who act as if they have her interests in mind but couldn’t care less about her.

Theodora, by contrast, comes from a world of “delight and soft colors,” of laughter and perfume. We’re told, coyly, that she shares her apartment with a “friend.” In early drafts of Hill House, Jackson made Theodora—or Theo—explicitly lesbian. As with so much in this novel, she decided to explain less rather than more.

We’re told even less about Luke: only that he is a liar and a thief, as well as being lazy and having bad taste in friends. What’s he even doing in this novel? Jackson doesn’t seem that interested in him. Or is she?

What stood out to you about these first few pages?

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