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

[The final installment of the essay that began on Friday.]


III.MODEL HOMES

The 50th Anniversary of the publication of The Haunting of Hill House marks an appropriate time not only to look back on the novel itself but also to note its subsequent influence.  To date there have been two film versions: Robert Wise's faithfully atmospheric The Haunting (1962), and Jan de Bont's abominable, CGI-rife remake (1999), the latter as critically panned as the former is acclaimed.  Still, the book's greater legacy can be traced in the realm of fiction.  Over the past five decades, Hill House has provided an architectural blueprint for a slew of haunted houses in the horror community.  Consider the following macabre McMansions that have sprung up across the American Gothic landscape:

Richard Matheson's Hell House (1971) stands as a more graphically violent and sexually charged version of Hill House.  The basic plot parallels here are hard to miss: an investigating foursome move into a remote New England house of horrors (in which the servant couple from a neighboring town refuse to sleep [Matheson 3]).  Moreover, the character of Florence Tanner clearly mirrors Eleanor Vance.  At first sight Florence exclaims that Hell House is "hideous" (27), echoing Eleanor's initial outraged reaction to Hill House.  Eleanor balks at entering the library because of the perceived stench; Florence can't go into the chapel because the "atmosphere here is more than [she] can bear" (35).  Much like the psychologically fragile Eleanor, Florence represents the group's "weakest link" (286), and dies after being fiendishly duped by the ghost haunting Hell House.

Anne Rivers Siddons's Southern gothic novel The House Next Door (1978) involves a recently-built but malignant home ("haunted" by the latent evil of its architect) that preys "on the weakness and inherent flaws in the characters of the people who live there" (Siddons 327).  Siddons has cited Hill House "as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read" (qtd. in King, Danse Macabre 259), and such reading has left a discernible imprint.  Planning to set fire to the neighboring home, Siddons's narrator Colquitt Kennedy comments in the book's prologue that "[i]n another time they would have plowed the charred ground and sowed it with salt" (5)--a remark echoing Dr. Montague's indirect quote of a former tenant of Hill House, who "ended by saying that in his opinion, the house ought to be burned down and the ground sowed with salt" (Jackson 51).

The titular domicile of Peter Straub's 1980 novel Shadowland (a "haunted house" [170] in the sense that it brims with the dark magic of the master conjurer residing there) exists several miles beyond a town whose very name recalls the village of Hillsdale in Jackson's novel: "Hilly Vale" (162).  During a summer apprenticeship at Shadowland back when he was 15, protagonist Tom Flanagan "felt the house claiming him" (320), and "[i]t seemed to him that he could visualize every inch of the house, every curve of the stair posts, every watermark in the kitchen sink" (319)--sensations similar to Eleanor's ostensible communion with Hill House toward the end of Jackson's novel.  The tunnel below Shadowland formerly used for "bootlegging" (375) also serves as a literalization of Eleanor's early fancy of "a passageway going off into the hills and probably used by smugglers" (Jackson 23).

Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin's A Cold Blue Light (1983) builds upon the same foundation that Matheson did earlier: a team of scientists and mediums descends upon the Pennsylvanian manse known as Aubrey House.  Another Eleanor Vance clone appears in the person of Vita Henry, a sexually-frustrated woman tragically seduced into believing that Aubrey House "welcomed and protected her" (144).  The cold blue light seemingly rooted in the upstairs hallway of Aubrey House also brings to mind the cold spot fixed outside the door of Hill House's second-floor nursery.

In his short novel Elsewhere, Exorcist scribe William Peter Blatty has a quartet of investigators--a group led by a university professor with research interests in the paranormal--settle into a labyrinthine mansion ("it's disordered, no sense to where anything leads" [613]) with a shady reputation.  Blatty (whose plot ultimately offers a clever twist on the haunted house formula) echoes famous fright moments from Jackson's novel and Wise's film, most notably the scene of a furious, inexplicable pounding on a bedroom door.

In his postmodern horror novel Demon Theory (2006), Stephen Graham Jones diligently cites his sources within a slew of endnotes.  Note 29 (occasioned by the characters' first glimpse of the ominous house in the novel) appropriately reads: "In Shirley Jackson's 1959 urtext The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's first thought after turning 'her car onto the last stretch of straight drive' and encountering Hill House 'face to face' is that the house is vile.  Her second thought is 'get away from here at once'" (Jones 380). 

Sarah Langan's Audrey's Door (2009) wears its influences on its leaves (in a short preface, the author lists The Haunting of Hill House first among the texts that "particularly inspired" her novel).  The book's haunted Manhattan apartment building proves just as architecturally askew as Hill House: "The Breviary's floors differed in height from one story to the next, and its walls didn't intersect at right angles but were either obtuse or acute" (9).  Recent renter Audrey Lucas--a socially awkward, emotionally unstable thirtysomething who's been scarred by her lifelong struggle with her mentally ill mother--also reflects Jackson's protagonist when she sees "through the Breviary's eyes" (388) and achieves an omniscient awareness of events throughout the building.  Perhaps Langan's most impressive echo of Jackson, though, comes in the opening of Chapter 41 "The Breviary" ("No thinking creature can tolerate captivity.  In the presence of just four white walls, the mind invents [...]" [371])--a clever pastiche of Hill House's famous "No live organism..." first paragraph.

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

[The second installment of the essay that began with yesterday's post.]


II.WALKING THE HOUSE

A strictly psychological reading of the events of the novel does not suffice; Eleanor's troubled subconscious is not the true source of the haunting at Hill House.  Yes, Eleanor appears capable of telekinesis (an ability she consciously denies), as suggested by the repressed "showers of stones" incident (3) when Eleanor was twelve and still distraught over her father's death a month earlier.  And yes, she carries a lot more baggage to Hill House than her one suitcase.  She's spent the past eleven years (from age 21-32) nursing her invalid mother, a miserable period marked by "small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness and unending despair" (3).  Her life circumstances have no doubt stunted her personal growth: Eleanor "had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words."  It is certainly tempting to read this backstory into Eleanor's experiences at Hill House.  For instance, her underlying guilt that she is to blame for her mother's death--because she didn't awake and respond to her mother's knock on the bedroom wall--can be seen to manifest as the awful pounding on the bedroom door at Hill House.  Similarly, the "cold air of mold and earth" (75) that (only) Eleanor senses within the library might merely be an association on her part of the library's books with those she had to read aloud to her mother "for two hours every afternoon" (62).  The cold spot inside the doorway to the nursery likewise can be linked to Eleanor's shame at having to sleep (as she finally admits to the others at novel's end) "in the baby's room" (177) of her sister's home.

By the same token, the hatred Eleanor feels for her family can be seen to color her relationship with her pseudo-sibling Theodora.  Did Eleanor (who in her self-consciousness is quick to sense persecution by others) bloody Theodora's more stylish wardrobe in retaliation, resenting Theodora's suggestion that Eleanor herself had scribbled the message "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" (107) on the wall of the upstairs hallway?  Before chalking up the incident to a fit of telekinetic rage, though, one must note that the initial hallway message was written in chalk.  At the start of the scene immediately following the soaking of Theodora's clothes, Luke Sanderson reads from a book he's removed from the Hill House library: "It was the custom, rigidly adhered to [...] for the public executioner, before a quartering, to outline his knife strokes in chalk upon the belly of his victim--for fear of a slip, you understand" (116).  The timing and nature of the detail raises the idea that whatever haunts Hill House has acted to "quarter" the four human investigators by turning them against one another.  One simply cannot discount the possibility that the haunting agent taps into Eleanor's fear and loathing (much like the telepathic Theodora repeatedly reads Eleanor's mind) and uses this insider information to insidious advantage.  The strange happenings at the house (e.g. thunderous pounding on the bedroom door while Montague and Luke are simultaneously lured away by a canine apparition) seem too complex and diverse to be the mere product of telekinesis, however prodigious Eleanor's talent might be.

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.

Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#18

#18. "Dolan's Cadillac"

In this dark-crime novella collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, King modernizes and Americanizes Edgar Allan Poe's classic revenge tale, "The Cask of Amontillado" (which is set in an unnamed European city during Carnival season).  Would-be government witness Elizabeth Robinson is killed by a car bomb before she can ever testify against the titular gangster Dolan.  And so for the next nine years her husband watches and waits (all the while goaded by the ghostly voice of his dead wife inside his head) for the opportunity to dish out appropriate retribution.  Finally, Robinson hatches a plan to dig "the world's longest grave" on a dark desert highway (cue the Eagles music) stretching between Los Angeles and Las Vegas; he will bury Dolan alive inside the very Sedan DeVille he is chauffeured around in, converting the vehicle into "an upholstered eight-cylinder fuel-injected coffin."

King's narrative skills are perfectly employed in this self-described "archetypal horror story, with its mad narrator and its account of a premature burial in the desert."  The author ratchets up the suspense as only he can, detailing Robinson's rigors and fears as the still-grieving widower sets up his elaborate trap.  The climactic confrontation between Robinson and the trapped Dolan is also a virtuoso act of scene-building on King's part.  Here the echoes of Poe's Montresor and Fortunato characters grow quite strong, as Robinson answers his victim's screams with those of his own, and mocks Dolan's desperate cries:

"For the love of God!" he shrieked.  "For the love of God, Robinson!"

"Yes," I said, grinning.  "For the love of God."

I put the chunk of asphalt in neatly next to its neighbor, and although I listened, I heard him no more.

Still, this isn't the end of the story, because Robinson (even as he succeeds in his murderous scheme) becomes haunted by the bogeyman image/mad laughter of Dolan.  King proves to be an astute student of Poe, picking up on a key (yet often overlooked) fact of Montresor's narration: for all its superficial bravado, Montresor's tale--told fifty years post facto--has an undercurrent of guilt and dread running through it.*  As Robinson's sanity caves inward, the reader of King's novella is forced to consider that much like the patch of faux roadway that dooms Dolan, vengeance might not be all it's cracked up to be.


* If you'll forgive a bit of shameless (is there really any other kind?) self-promotion: this is the same undercurrent that I trace out in my short-story sequel to "A Cask of Amontillado," entitled "Something There Is" (available as a free podcast [episode #166] from Pseudopod).

Take a Dip in the M.R. Trivia Pool

Today's game is like a combination of a crossword and a word jumble.  I present four trivia questions related to American Gothic, and provide the number of letters in each answer.  All the letters comprising the answers are drawn from the letter pool preceding the questions, so you can cross the letters off as you go (each successful answer will thus improve your chances of coming up with the correct responses to the other questions).  The letters that have an asterisk (*) underneath them can then be unscrambled to form the answer to the (separate) bonus question.

So grab your pencil and scratch paper, and good luck.  If you think you've got the answers, go ahead and post them as a comment.  If no brave souls step forward, I will supply the answers tomorrow in the comments section of this post.


First, the letter pool:

M   D   R   S   N   E   M   L   S


L   P   I   O   S   Y   E   S   O


O   R   H   G   U   E   A   E   M


E   O   Y   Y   A   R   T   S   O


And now the trivia questions:

1.The one word The Stand's Tom Cullen would get right in a spelling bee:


_   _   _   _
    *


2."The foulest stench is in the air / The funk of forty thousand years / And grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to...


_   _   _   _      _   _   _   _       _   _   _   _
    *                          *                   *


3.Dick Hancock's partner in crime:


_   _   _   _   _       _   _   _   _   _
        *   *


4.End of the world for Twilight Zone bibliophile Henry Bemis when he breaks his...


_   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _
    *       *       *               *




BONUS.  New York cigar store girl who inspired a Poe story:


_   _   _   _       _   _   _   _   _   _