“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.”
I think this is likely one of the best, if not the best, horror novels I’ve ever read. By the end, I felt thoroughly gaslit. It is, after all, a horror that is psychological, in stark contrast to the slasher, gasher tropes we see so often in movies and TV.
Eleanor is a tragic figure, or so I thought at first. The book begins wholesomely enough. There is sadness in her life, no doubt, but as she makes her way to Hill House, there is a joyful American spirit in her that one might delight in. Her drive is especially reminiscent, to me, of long road trips my family used to take to the Southwest: endless driving, admiring the scenery, the moment, the sense of freedom. Even in stealing the car she shares with her sister, you can kind of justify it because she’s reclaiming her freedom. She’s demanding life gives her her “cup of stars”.
This seems to continue as she finds a family in the people she’s staying with at the House. Her relationship with Theodora feels peculiarly strong. Indeed, I would even believe that it was queer-coded for the time it was published. Their use of humour is especially wholesome at this point—whether as a tool of social bonding or a cope to manage their anxieties.
Major Spoilers
It takes a darker turn when Eleanor talks about the haunting coming from inside her head. Then, of course, we start to see her become more isolated, talking about the House like she’s a part of it, growing more socially conscious as if she is less certain about her previous understanding of what relationships she had. This eventually boils over and she goes completely mad. I really begun to understand I was being taken for a ride when all four spent the night together in the doctor’s room as they were tormented relentlessly by the House. Then, however, the sun rises, and it all seems a funny joke, as if a silly dream, to all of them but Eleanor. Consequently, she begins to go completely mad, and at the end I could see just how far gone she and I really were, wondering whether or not I grasped what happened at all. In the end, she seemed quite the villain.
Reactions
Chapter 2: Is it just me or is there something between Eleanor and Theodora? At the end of chapter two, their exchanges feel almost flirtatious. And the way the journey and claustrophobia are described, it feels almost like retreats I’ve had at monasteries or temples. I can note some of Burke’s ideas about the sublime, particularly the uniformity and infinity that its space is supposed to create. The colours are another interesting extension of this that his theory doesn’t seem to articulate.
Chapter 3: Partway through the third chapter and some of those themes repeat themselves. Definitely feels queer coded. And their jokiness with each other is unexpected. Eleanor’s monologue seems to indicate a social anxiety and repression, maddeningly mimicking her earlier fantasies about escape. She escapes into their jokes about who they are, realizing she could be anyone.
Chapter 4: They’re starting to sound more unhinged. Laughing at everything, bickering with each other. Is this it or does it get crazier?
Chapter 6: What the actual fuck is going on lol. Am i supposed to wonder if she’s just losing her mind? It doesn’t seem like it
Chapter 7: Just finished the chapter where Mrs Montague arrives… What the actual fuck was that. I pictured chaos and then it was just morning???? Also, Mrs Montague is a total bitch, my god. Honestly I wondered if Eleanor is just dreaming the whole ordeal, but she can’t be. She seems exhausted by the haunting, willing to let go out of sheer exhaustion.
End: Reading the intro, I realize how taken in I was. That early family life… Was totally misread. i actually thought it was sweet. I actually thought those fantasies on the road were a bit wholesome. A lot of what she said, what she pined for reminded me of myself and how I am. It’s just wild. And no, I meant the family dynamic among the group. I was buying into it for a while. I would have. And I recognize that same feeling of belonging in my own life. Feeling it, then realizing it’s not real.
Sympathy for Eleanor
Perhaps what I found so chilling about Eleanor as an unreliable narrator was how sympathetic I found her. I could relate to many of the interpretations she had made of her relationship with the group, particularly as she described her sense of belonging and her social anxieties. Or even her fantasies about what her life could be like! And we all do this to a degree, do we not? We imagine ourselves as we could be, not as we are. We might picture ourselves in our ideal house with our ideal partner, our ideal job, etc. But this is not the “absolute reality” we read about in the first line. But what if we were left alone with our thoughts? What if we experienced absolute reality? How would we take it?
A Perverse Retreat
Obviously, we would not remain sane. The funny thing to me about this book was how it mirrored many of my experiences on retreats. Both when I stayed with the Benedictines a few years ago, and when I completed a Zen retreat last year, the experience warped my perception of reality. I wasn’t haunted per se, but perhaps that’s a good word to describe the fantasies running around my head when I was separated from my usual space.
Like Eleanor arriving at Hill House, I remember my arrival at the monastery with recollection of the dread anxiety I felt. It was surreal. Not quite what I expected? And sure enough, while I was there, I exhausted my fantasies of life—the things that I missed and wanted to do—to escape from the absolute reality of my seclusion. I did everything possible, including contemplating my running away. Absolute reality can shatter us, so better to live in comfort with our illusions of self, identity, and society. It’s all shit we make up, for better or worse.
The difference, however, lies in what came of our respective experiences. By the end of a retreat, I find myself settling in. Indeed, around the halfway point, I begin to feel much calmer with my surroundings. This is true of Eleanor as well to a superlative degree: she began to love Hill House, and could scarcely contemplate leaving. For myself, there were still things I missed, and I was looking forward to getting back to them. But she had nothing to return to: no life, no identity, no why to give her any satisfaction. All she had was a mother to dote on, and a sister/brother-in-law to ask things of her. Not even her own apartment. What would she be returning to? Perhaps this is what made it so easy for her to lie on the first night: for her, unlike the others, was that concoction of false identities actually a joke to ease the dread of Hill House, or was it her way of indulging an unhealthy fantasy of a life she would never dare to live?
Identity
In a lot of ways, this reminds of me of [[Dazai - No Longer Human|Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human]]. While it is largely about suicidal ideation on the surface, I think we can go deeper. Dazai spends a lot of time on this idea of identity and deception among human beings. He says something to the effect of “we are always deceiving each other in human life,” and this may as well be the philosophy embraced by Eleanor in Hill House.
From the very first, she is putting on a persona to fit in, like Yozo Oba, but there is nothing there to speak of. It would be interesting to draw further comparison between him and Eleanor because in actual fact they are very different as people with strikingly similar problems: Yozo ebbs and flows in his life whereas Eleanor tries to exercise her agency. In reality, however, they do the exact opposite: Yozo makes poor choices in love and vice, and Eleanor surrenders herself to Hill House. Both kill themselves.
Gender
It’s impossible to speak about this book without discussing gender. Eleanor is the stereotypical doting woman from the 1950s: she is constantly at the service of others, with no will of her own. She is repressed. Theodora is an excellent foil to this: she is very much larger than life and conscious of her own decisions and wishes. She had the aura of a flapper, at least in my mind. This contrast early on in their relationship was pointed out when they discussed the ways they complement each other. This is true. Theodora seemed to bring Eleanor out of her shell, and we were happy (as the reader) to see her grow close to someone. Of course, this resulted in jealously and adolescent emotion from Eleanor, who likely hasn’t felt desire so freely before, but it is an interesting companionship to say the least.
Mrs. Montague
The foil to both these women would appear in the form of Mrs. Montague, a simply ridiculous woman. What amazed me about her was how domineering she was, and yet so oblivious to all that was going on around her. To say she upset a happy dynamic would be the understatement of the year.
Burke
Throughout the novel, I made various mental comparisons to the aesthetic work of Edmund Burke. In his Enquiry, he talks about the sublime as something that instills a sort of pleasant terror, which accurately describes the way I felt about this book as a whole. It would take a fair while to devise a complete synthesis, however suffice it to say (for now) that many of his ideas about the sublime can be applied to Hill House and Jackson’s novel as a whole. An extraordinary exploration of the gothic not as architecture but as a state of mind.