Haunting Anniversary: A Half-Century of Hill House (Part One)

October 2009 marked the 50th Anniversary of Shirley Jackson's masterwork, The Haunting of Hill House; in honor of that occasion, I wrote a critical essay that was ultimately published in the February 2010 issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction.  Over the course of the next three days, I will post that same essay here on Macabre Republic.  In today's first installment, I consider the critical commentary that has accrued over the past half-century, pointing out how such analysis has actually led readers astray.  In Part Two tomorrow, I will offer my own close reading of the novel, culminating with the identification of the specific ghost haunting Hill House.  And on Sunday, I will survey the various haunted-house novels influenced by Jackson's book, and offer my final appraisal.

The essay is written in MLA format, giving parenthetical citations of quoted sources.  A Works Cited section providing complete bibliographical information will appear at the end of the essay on Sunday.

Hope the essay inspires you to re-read Jackson's classic novel (if you've never ventured inside Hill House before, stop right now and go pick up a copy for yourself--it's time to find out what you've been missing all these years!).


Haunting Anniversary: A Half-Century of Hill House

By Joe Nazare

In the oft-cited opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson writes: "Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more" (1).  The enigmatic novel itself (first published by The Viking Press in October 1959) has now stood for fifty years, holding darkness within seemingly for the duration of its existence.  This golden anniversary thus marks an appropriate time to shine new light on the book, to reinvestigate Hill House and to consider the half-century legacy of Jackson's monumental work of dark fantasy.


I.LANDSCAPING

Regrettably, the ivy of literary criticism attached to Hill House has tended to obscure its finer features.  Biographers, scholars, and pop-culture commentators alike have proven dubious guides, telling tales riddled with factual error and taking interpretive leaps that a careful reader hesitates to follow.  The first step, then, to pushing toward a clearer understanding and interpretation of the novel involves hacking through such accrued verbiage.


Judy Oppenheimer's hefty biography Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson has surprisingly little to say about The Haunting of Hill House, and the scant analysis it does offer is marred by inaccuracy.  Discussing Eleanor Vance's climactic smashing of her car "into a wall" (actually, it was a tree), Oppenheimer asserts that the protagonist kills herself "triumphantly.  For it is not a defeat, far from it--in the moment she makes her decision to merge with the [house's] dark powers, Eleanor is more blazingly alive than she has ever been in her life" (227).  Grossly misreading the novel's ending, Oppenheimer ignores the dismay Eleanor expresses when facing fatality: "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" (Jackson 182).  Oppenheimer concludes her chapter soon thereafter with the punning assertion that Jackson's "triumph was as total, and as smashing, as Elinor's [sic]," and the glaring typo here does nothing to inspire trust in the biographer's attentive reading of the novel.

In Shirley Jackson's American Gothic, scholar Darryl Hattenhauer devotes an entire chapter to Hill House, but his study proves no more reliable than Oppenheimer's.  Hattenhauer (169) states that the line "Fear and guilt are sisters" (Jackson 127) is an admonition inscribed by Hill House's founding father Hugh Crane in his daughter's primer, whereas the line is a bit of third-person narration that appears in the chapter section subsequent to the main characters' perusal of said primer (Jackson writes: "Fear and guilt are sisters; Theodora caught [up with Eleanor] on the lawn.").  Discussing the scene in which Theodora's bedroom is defiled, Hattenhauer observes that Eleanor "apparently smears menstrual blood on Theodora's clothing and then blocks out any memory of doing so" (163).  But that would have to have been one deluge of a period to produce "so much blood" (Jackson 114), and Hattenhauer's reading of the incident in natural and psychological terms fails to explain the complete disappearance (later in the novel) of the blood smears from both the bedroom wall and Theodora's clothing.  Finally, Hattenhauer outdoes himself when considering the author's notes for her novel: "Jackson (apparently unconsciously) inscribes herself into the house.  Her several sketches of the two-storey house exhibit traces of her body" (164).  Naturally, Hattenhauer fails to reproduce the sketches that would corroborate such an off-the-wall theory.

The main problem, meanwhile, with Dale Bailey's American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, is that the author (a horror writer as well as an academic) seems preoccupied with legitimizing the haunted-house subgenre as a subject worthy of scholarly scrutiny.  In his constant search for deeper meaning, Bailey refuses to consider the novels' domestic horrors on their own terms: "In the hands of the best paperback novelists," he writes, "the haunted house becomes a strikingly versatile metaphor; transcending the glossy cliches of formula, it drags into light the nightmarish tensions of gender, class, and culture hidden at the heart of American life" (24).  Accordingly, Bailey argues that Jackson employs Hill House "as a metaphor for an oppressive patriarchal society" (28).  He reads the novel in light of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," an 1892 weird tale in which medically-prescribed home confinement exacerbates rather than cures the female narrator's mental and emotional woes.  Jackson no doubt alludes to Gilman's story (although Bailey fails to forge any specific intertextual links).  Dr. John Montague's plan to "rent Hill House for three months" (Jackson 1) starting in late June recalls the doctor named John in "The Yellow Wallpaper" who likewise makes a summer rental of a Gothic manse.  His wife's comments as she obsesses over the titular wallpaper (e.g. "It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions" [Gilman 462]) are echoed by Eleanor's reaction to her blue-wallpapered bedroom at Hill House.  Scanning the perimeter of the room, Eleanor ponders:

It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible length; this is where they want me to sleep, Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners--what breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth...  (28-29)

Yet just because two texts parallel each other in some regards does not mean they do so in all regards.  Jackson ultimately appears more interested in the frisson generated by "The Yellow Wallpaper's"  ambiguities (mental breakdown occurring in a quite possibly haunted setting) than in rehearsing an unmistakable feminist critique (during the rest cure forced upon her, Gilman's narrator significantly comes to perceive a female figure trapped behind the wallpaper).  Bailey, whose book is representative of the predominant feminist-psychoanalytical approach to The Haunting of Hill House, misses the mark when he targets the patriarchy as the arch-villain of Jackson's novel.  Eleanor's problems trace back to her relationship with her unpleasant mother, not the father whose absence Eleanor regrets: during her childhood "it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father's death on a cold wet day" (Jackson 9-10).  The textual evidence further contradicts Bailey's positing of Hill House as "the vast corrupt palace of the patriarchy itself" (41); with its "concentric circles of rooms" (Jackson 73) and rounded furniture, Hill House (whose very name suggests female contours) is more overtly figured as a "mother house" (156).  Similarly, Bailey's ultra-Freudian assertion that Eleanor "ascends the library's phallic tower in a moment of 'intoxicating' sexual union with the patriarchy" (43) overstates the case--in this scene Eleanor (a character to sexually repressed to engage in wanton union) believes she is chasing after her "Mother" (168).  Sometimes, Bailey should be reminded, a tower is just a tower.

Bailey is not the only horror author to make a nonfiction study of Hill House.  In Danse Macabre, Stephen King devotes considerable space to Jackson's novel, which he lauds as one of the only two (Henry James's The Turn of the Screw being the other) "great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years" (270).  King's comments are not devoid of error--even as he extols the brilliance of Jackson's opening paragraph, he flubs the analysis of the lines.  Jackson begins: "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 [...]" (1).  The implication here is that Hill House has been subjected to too much absolute reality, but King misreads the passage and claims that the house "does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; therefore it does not dream; therefore it is not sane" (256).  Also, for all the admirable rigor King demonstrates in mapping out the novel's interpretive possibilities, he falls disappointingly short in his commentary by ruling out one particular reading: "the one thing we can be sure of is that there are no actual ghosts in Hill House.  None of the four companions come upon the shade of the companion flapping up the hall with with a rope burn around her ectoplasmic neck" (274, emphasis mine).  This last statement is true enough, yet signals how easily Jackson's subtlety can mislead--just because the author is not so blunt as to let a ghost manifest front and center in the novel does not mean it is not there haunting Hill House.

King's denial of a ghostly presence in Hill House represents the fundamental flaw in the literary criticism of Jackson's novel.  Time and again over the past half-century, the strange happenings at Hill House have been explained in either psychological (i.e. as the unconscious projections of the disturbed and telekinetically-gifted Eleanor) or vaguely supernatural terms (i.e. the house itself has been malevolently sentient since its construction).  Marvin Kaye, in a bibliographical appendix to his anthology Ghosts, qualifies his inclusion of The Haunting of Hill House, which is "technically a twisted story of haunted people" (650).  Critics Dara Downey and Darryl Jones conversely assert: "The manifestations themselves, their multifarious nature, and the fact that they almost never take visible form, all imply an amorphous malevolent force, without origins or motives" (226).  A closer reading of the novel, though, exposes the limits of these polarized perspectives, which jointly overlook the fact that Jackson has scripted a bona fide ghost story.  Lenemaja Friedman is a rare critic who holds that "the reader must accept the possibility of ghosts...all members of the party share in seeing and hearing the same manifestations, which are not the product of any one person's imagination" (126).  But one can still take another step beyond Friedman's generic discussion of "the spirits of the house" (124).  For all her crafted ambiguity, Jackson embeds key clues within her text that point to a specific ghost haunting the premises.  After fifty years' worth of confusion, the time has come to identify (the origins and motives of) Hill House's resident revenant.

[Essay continues tomorrow]