i was taking apart the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House as an academic exercise and it’s just. so fucking brilliant.
shirley jackson was almost always exploring social pressures and the expectations for how (white) women should behave in her time and she was so good at capturing the strangeness of never ‘growing out’ of your childhood fears and hurts. the brilliance of hill house (and the failures of a Certain Sequel) is that the hauntings at hill house only serve to create bigger emotional reactions to feelings that are already there. eleanor crain is a disillusioned woman who was socially isolated for a period of time because she was her mother’s caretaker. taking care of her mother was the sensible and proper thing for eleanor to do; however, after her mothers death, eleanor is set adrift. the world is open to her but she is alone in it. interacting with new people is daunting and she is incredibly self conscious about how she will be perceived. this only serves to make her feel more isolated.
“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.”
caring for your dying mother is, unfortunately, conditions of absolute reality. there is no avoiding the fact that death is coming for her and it will, some day, come for you. eleanor’s whole thing is that she has made herself small her entire life. she was passive and inactive. she spent years caring for a woman she fucking hated. in shirley jackson’s world, she sets up that anything can dream! even the smallest things, the larks and the katydids, the pieces of scenery you don’t much consider, can dream of being or doing something else.
“Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood 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 walled there, walked alone.”
the descriptors jackson used could all be applied to eleanor. a house standing alone against it’s hills, a woman standing inside her environment and finding herself fundamentally different. eleanor did as she was expected. she was an upright daughter, she was neat, firm, sensible, she was steady. and yet! she walked alone!!! hill house is a microchasm of a reality eleanor already knows: you can be everything you should be and still there can be darkness within. her mental illness and her outlook on the world have set her apart from her contemporaries, have created this massive divide between herself and theo or luke.
but also, there is a part of eleanor who is choosing this. at times, eleanor could reconcile with people or make greater efforts to get along. her feelings can be seductive and overwhelming and she keeps choosing to do these things that are antithetical to what she really wants. she wants community and purpose and to fill her cup, so to speak. but she doesn’t just exist. she sets herself up against people. “Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills…” it was so smart of her to have such an antagonistic word about a house that, seemingly, just sits amidst some hills.
all of this to say. Shirley Jackson. you are the writer of all time. i love you
