A review by stubbornjerk
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I watched every bit of media I could find about this book that wasn't the Liam Neeson adaptation (and I'd like for it to remain that way). I've watched video essays about the differences in adaptations and about haunted houses, read the review at the beginning of my copy full to the brim with spoilers and someone else's thoughts on the matter.

But I still can't wrap my head around it.

I suppose that was the intention, wasn't it.

In all regards, The Haunting of Hill House was a character study– as I'm sure most things are– but this one is specifically is about Eleanor Vance and how her fear of loneliness drove her to toxic dependency on an amoral concept of a house that wants nothing but to possess her. Literally and figuratively.

Despite this, The Haunting of Hill House is a poem. It contains poetry and songs, sure– The Grattan Murders, the verses from Twelfth Night that Eleanor sings again and again as a reassurance, a sort of mantra or prayer– but its events rely on these repetitions as well. Its prose is deceptively simple and builds up and up until the climax of Eleanor's stay in the house. It states that a house, Hill House– a structure made by Hugh Crain about a century prior to the book's events– has intent and emotion.

Jackson telling me that, through the bookended narrations opening and ending this novel, doesn't convince me of its reality anymore than the characters' insistence of it. How likely is a house built by someone else to be malicious towards people who it was not made for? How much of these views belong to the characters themselves or were impressed upon them to soothe their skepticisms? Dr. Montague said it best after their first event:

“No, 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. ”

Because they do believe that the house is doing these unexplainable things, these experiences that only four of them can experience. And collectively, they believe that because the house is doing it, the house must be malicious. But is it? “No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself," the doctor said.

But, suppose we take Jackson's statements bookending the novel another way. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” it says, and Hill House is, decidedly, not sane, inferring that the house itself is alive.

That doesn't denote malice either. And throughout the book, you see it reflected on Eleanor because, again, this book is about her. In fleshing out Eleanor's social anxiety and deep insecurity and inferiority complex and fear of alienation, and the ambiguity of that being the house's influence on her versus how she generally just is, you can see that nothing Eleanor thinks, she thinks out of malice. And nothing she does is either. It's out of an urgent need to belong, to grieve, to become. She dreams often in order to escape her own absolute reality, of being solitary but not lonely (nestled in an orchard of oleander), of having her creativity (her cup of stars), of having protection (her stone lions), and of being loved and taken care of (her wanting to come home with Theodora).

The night after she surrenders to the house, the night before she comes home, she enters the library she says smelled of death and decay. Every time the door to it opens, she calls out to her mother, who she found dead after passing in the night, so she would know, wouldn't she? And the house(?) beckons her. She runs up and up and up to the top of the tower, running away (she was good at that, Theo had said) in a fit of warmth and elation, embodying the hauntings the four of them had been experiencing, feeling like the mornings after a haunting, and the narration takes up like the reverse of a bad dream, as Luke says.

Like the narration is telling it back over and over to ensure us that it did happen, that it was happening. Only, all of them were witnessing it, experiencing it too, so it must be real.

The Haunting of Hill House is a study on Eleanor Vance's view of her own self. Someone unfit to house children, someone whose valuables are quarreled over by sisters, someone nestled apart from everyone else. Altogether unwelcoming upon first glance– abandoned and only barely hospitable– but so very, desperately, lonely to belong to someone.
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