Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

*I’m probably going to spoil the shit out of the book, so don’t read this unless you have already read the book yourself or don’t give a damn about spoilers.*

I swear to you that I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House somewhere around 2002 or 2003.  I can picture the cover still, and even the odd creases on the cover from where it was bent when placed down carelessly once.  My wife and I had been huge fans of the Robert Wise 1963 film adaptation for a long time, so we decided to read the source material.  But here’s the thing, as of two months ago, I would have told you the book was pretty damn close to the movie.

What the hell was I doing in 2003?!  The book is radically different from the movie, in spite of there being many scenes and dialogue (or voice-overs) pulled right from Jackson’s book.  Nelson Gidding, the writer of The Haunting’s screenplay was right to pull from Jackson’s novel, because Jackson’s writing is all kinds of delicious.  We have the Library of America edition, which comes with the collection of short stories published as The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, published originally in 1949, ten years before The Haunting of Hill House.  The stories in it are excellent (you can see my thoughts on them in the previous blog post or under that book on GoodReads), but in the ten years between publications, Jackson has grown significantly as an artist.  Her writing here is sharp and moving.  She is in top form throughout the novel.

As for what Jackson is doing with the book, I have been struggling with that for weeks now, and all I have to show for it are a bunch of scattered and not-necessarily-connected thoughts.  Rather than waiting for them all to gel together (which I’m not sure they’ll ever do), I’m going to just throw them out here.

There’s something going on about family.  Eleanor, Theo, Luke, and Montague are something like a family in the decidedly domestic space of Hill House.  Dr. Montague is a fatherly figure and the other three are like children, playing hide and seek and planning picnics and being lighthearted and playful with each other generally.  Theo notes that the statue of Hugh Crain depicts a family and points out who is who in the picture.  That Theo has no patronymic is an interesting choice and I think related to this idea.

There’s something going on about morality and the female body.  While Theo is a modern woman, and Eleanor is doing her best to play the part, there are trappings surrounding them of an archaic and oppressive (and unfortunately still too-modern) moral sensibility regarding women’s morality and their sexuality.  Hill House was built in the Victorian period, and Hugh Crain’s book for his daughters is all about the dangers of their own sexuality.  And for as modern as Dr. Montague seems, his novel of choice is Pamela, an 18^th century novel about the perils of a young woman’s virtues.  This combines with the sexual tension between Eleanor and Theo in the book.  While Luke is a possible romantic interest for both Theo and Nell, Jackson herself seems much more interested in the chemistry between the two women, both platonic and romantic.  Wise’s movie plays up Theo’s homosexuality, but there is very little evidence of that in Jackson’s novel; Jackson puts much more attention on what Nell wants from Theo.

I love the nature of the haunting itself as depicted in the novel.  Mrs. Montague thinks she has it all figured out.  Ghosts are unhappy and unfortunate souls who simply need compassion and understanding to be freed from their burdens and sent on their way to the heavenly light.  While Mrs. Montague is a riotously funny and engaging character, it is made clear that she has no real understanding of what is happening.  There do not appear to be ghosts in Hill House.  Instead, Hill House is itself sentient, calling to and compelling Eleanor.

The house controls the senses to some degree.  You hear the knocking and pounding, but only if it wants you to, for Mrs. Montague and Arthur hear nothing.  You smell the decay of death in the library, but only if it wants you to, for the others do not smell what Eleanor smells.  They all agree that food tastes better at Hill House, beyond the mere cooking skills of Mrs. Dudley.  Hill House can make a roomful of blood appear and then just as easily make it disappear upon Mrs. Montague’s investigation.

There’s something about repetition in the way Hill House works.  Mrs. Montague observes that trapped spirits often just repeat themselves, sometimes filling up whole pages with repeated words or phrases.  Well guess who else repeats her thoughts and sayings?  Journey’s end in lovers meeting.  Nell has certain choral phrases she returns to throughout the novel, like one of the spirits Mrs. Montague is certain inhabits the home.  And don’t forget Mrs. Dudley, who’s ritual sayings become the butt of many jokes.  The house is calling to Eleanor, but it already has Mrs. Dudley, who cares for the home immensely.  Things must be in their proper place.  She gets annoyed with Hill House is spoken ill of.  She follows the others and put things back where they belong.  And though she leaves every night, she returns every day.

Or is Mrs. Dudley really like that?  Near the end of the novel, Eleanor is flitting about like an unseen spirit, listening to the conversations of the others, certain that they are all talking about her.  But Luke and Theo never mention her any more than Dr. Montague and Arthur.  In Mrs. Montague’s and Mrs. Dudley’s conversation, we hear a Mrs. Dudley completely unfamiliar to us.  She is conversing naturally and without ritual phrases, seemingly casual and an easy conversationalist.  It is, for me, a sort of wow moment that made me wonder what was really going on with our impression of her to begin with.

The book strikes that beautiful balance between Nell’s madness and the supernatural so that it is impossible to separate the two.  Nell is lost, displaced without anywhere to belong.  The dominating force in her life, her mother, is gone, and she is adrift, having never had a moment to find herself.  As she drives to Hill House in the first chapter, she is imagining all the possible futures for herself, all the places she might live.  But all those visions are a life of being alone, just herself and her stone lions.  At Hill House, she is presented the possibility of human company, and the other characters are presented as possible lovers and friends, each with something else to offer.  But when she chooses Theo and says that she will follow her and be with her, Theo roundly rejects her.  Hill House will of course have her.

So what does that all add up to?  Wonderment, as far as I’m concerned.  From the short stories of hers that I’ve read, it is clear that Jackson is not a fan of morals and tidy endings.  She likes the messy and the possible, the suggestion and the ghostly whispers of our human impulses.  There are no clean metaphors or declarations about life and humanity.  She is a smart, observant, witty, loving, and critical writer of the human condition and she’s more interested in turning over stones than putting a bow on anything.  Which is one of the reasons, I think, that I keep returning to The Haunting of Hill House.