Ali Reviews

Contains spoilers for The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

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What makes a home ‘haunted’?

Freud defines the uncanny as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’[1]. Andrew Hock Soon Ng writes: ‘corresponding with the familiar (heimlich, or the homely) that promotes these signifiers of home is also the unfamiliar (unheimlich, or the unhomely) that directly disperses them.’[2]

The uncanny is therefore inherently situated within the home. ‘Home’ is a place that holds myriad connotations and significance within a societal etymology. It is an enclosed space isolated from the outside and the ‘Other’.

However, ‘home’ also holds an importance beyond mere shelter and has become a metonymy for ideas of identity, economy, security, and social status. Some people locate the uncanniness of the haunted house as originating with the individual that inhabits it, rather than the house itself.

I think that The Haunting of Hill House demonstrates that an architectural space can, in itself, embody the uncanny. The novel is named after the house itself, emphasising Soon’s assertion that ‘the architecture’s prominence exceeds its function as backdrop but is in fact the very thing that engenders terror.’[6] Furthermore, the gendered make-up of the house creates a particular type of monstrous uncanny because its patriarchal, one-sided nature is inherently unnatural.

Luke Reid writes: ‘the house is more than a metaphor. It is a material presence in its own right, its architecture not merely an analogical backdrop or static setting’. [7]

Ultimately, Hill House forms an essentially uncanny, terrifying space that challenges one’s most intrinsic sense of self, blurring the boundaries of subjectivity and dissolving Eleanor into the architecture of the house itself.

Chaotic, confusing, and disorienting, the architecture of Hill House creates a gothic paranoia from its spatial configurations alone. Eleanor describes the second and third floors when she first enters the house:

She had a quick impression of the builders finishing off the second and third stories of the house with a kind of indecent haste, eager to finish their work without embellishment and get out of there, following the simplest possible pattern for the rooms. [8]

Compared to the labyrinthine organisation of the first storey, in which rooms connect to rooms without hallways to guide one, the second and third stories suggest an equally malign presence in their simplicity. Removing the agency of the builders, Eleanor also describes the house as having ‘formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity.’[9] The opposition posed here between Hill House and ‘humanity’ demonstrates its malignant goal to subsume the humans that enter within its walls. The effect of the construction of the house overall is frightening:

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. [10]

Hill House is personified here, terrifyingly. Its ‘face’ of ‘blank windows’ – like dead eyes – and a creepily ‘glee’ful ‘cornice’ turn the house into a character, its role in the narrative to corrupt and seduce Eleanor into its clutches. The architectural composition of the house plays an essential role in its hauntings. Eleanor has a better understanding of the confusing layout of Hill House than the others from early on. She tells Theo, ‘That’s the right one, I think […] with the dark room to go through, and then the dining room beyond.’ [11]

Early on, this awareness signals her connection to the house and separation from the others. Doors refuse to stay open in Hill House; the doctor tells Theo, ‘You will never believe this now, of course […] but three minutes ago these doors were wide open.’[12] By spatially segregating the inhabitants, Hill House isolates and makes vulnerable each person.

Furthermore, it is difficult to enter or leave. ‘Eleanor, tugging, got the great front door open; it was just as heavy as it looked’[13]. When Eleanor later opens the door easily while running through the house like a ghost, it signals that she has assimilated with the architecture of the house and operates more as a spirit, ethereal and transhuman, rather than a person. ‘When she came inside she went across to open the window, which she always found closed’[14]. Like the doors, the windows remain shut, trapping the inhabitants in.

Hill House is defined as a place that is inherently evil. The Haunting of Hill House begins and ends with the same paragraph:

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; it had stood so 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 walked there, walked alone. [15]

The repetition of this passage at the end of the novel reveals that, despite all the tumultuous happenings that occur within the narrative, Hill House remains unchanged. Eleanor is subsumed into the ‘whatever’ of this last sentence. As many critics have discussed, the cyclical nature of the narrative reminds the reader of the inescapability and sturdiness of Hill House, cementing the structure within a gothic timelessness that is undisturbed by human (psycho)activity. Richard Pascal contends that ‘whatever walked there’ may, in fact, be a plurality: a family (or ‘unfamily’) collective inhabiting that ghostly space and metonymizing the American domestic unit, haunted by each individual family member’s conflicting desires and identities. [17]

While she runs throughout the house and knocks on doors, Eleanor-as-house thinks, ‘we trick them so easily’[18]. The lack of distinction between Eleanor and Hill House creates a pluralized doubling in her lack of individualisation. Regardless of who or what haunts Hill House, it is ‘commonly known as “haunted”’[19] and its physical and emotional seclusion from the nearby town heightens its eerie atmosphere: ‘information about finding the house was extremely difficult to get, particularly from the rural community which surrounded it.’ [20]

The house repels all who try to enter it.

Even Eleanor, at first encounter, despises it: ‘The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.’[21] The arrival of these thoughts ‘freely into her mind’ imply that Hill House places them there, encouraging her to leave before she can enter and disrupt the contented isolation of the house. Once she enters, however, Hill House wants Eleanor and intends to have her. ‘I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought’[22] upon first entering the house. Her progression into a full acceptance of the house is marked by her repetition of ‘coming’ before the first haunting; she has begun to ‘come home’[23]: ‘“Coming, mother, coming,” Eleanor said, fumbling for the light. “It’s all right, I’m coming.” Eleanor, she heard, Eleanor. “Coming, coming,” she shouted irritably, “just a minute, I’m coming.”’[24] While this passage has been examined by scholars as evidence of Eleanor’s guilt over her mother’s death, the lingering haunting of her mother over her life, and her sexual desire for Theo,[25] I read it as an entrance into the mind of Hill House. Not twenty-five pages later, she remarks, ‘I can’t picture any world but Hill House’[26]. Her assimilation has begun, and

she no longer wants to leave.

Why is Eleanor the only occupant who forms such a strong connection with Hill House? As critics such as Alexandra Warwick have noted, a house can function as a metonymy of the owner or occupant; the line between subject (Eleanor) and object (Hill House) blurs.[27] Tymon Adamczewski notes the parallel between this uncanny, posthuman architectural identification and the Gothic motif of doubling.[28] Eleanor’s compatibility with Hill House is what drew the doctor to her in the first place. Although Eleanor tells the doctor that her sojourn in Hill House is ‘the only time anything’s ever happened to me. I liked it’[29], she was, in fact, selected for her previous supernatural experience, specifically an instance of supernatural activity on a house:

[W]hen she was twelve years old … showers of stones had fallen on their house, … dropping from ceilings, rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof. … After three days Eleanor and her sister were removed to the house of a friend, and the stones stopped falling [30]

The stones disrupt the lives of the family by wreaking chaos on the architecture of the house: the ‘ceilings,’ ‘walls’, ‘windows’, and ‘roof’.

By threatening the very structure and foundation of the house, the falling stones demand attention from the inhabitants.

However, no moral resolution is offered for this strange event, which is forgotten by nearly ‘everyone’[31], including Eleanor and her sister. Importantly, the falling stones persist until Eleanor is ‘removed’ from their house, an eviction that is echoed in her forced leaving of Hill House at the end of the novel. ‘The house wants me to stay’[32], Eleanor protests, and, indeed, it seems Eleanor’s life has been mainly split between two houses that refuse to release her: the family home where she grew up and nursed her sickly mother as an adult for eleven years and Hill House. Like Hill House, her family home erupts into supernatural activity when the men of the house have been ejected. The stones fall when ‘their father had been dead for not quite a month’[33], and Eleanor and Theo first experience poltergeist activity in Hill House when secluded in their adjoined bedrooms and the men had been lured outside. ‘We were chasing a dog,’[34] Luke explains. Thus, these homes seek a female subject:

Eleanor.

Laughter marks Eleanor’s descent into the psychology of Hill House. During the first haunting, Eleanor’s connection to the house is made clear:

‘You can’t get in,’ Eleanor said wildly, and again there was a silence, as though the house listened with attention to her words, understanding, cynically agreeing, content to wait. A thin little giggle came, in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back, a little gloating laugh moving past them around the house [35]

This passage reads like a conversation between Eleanor and the house, which is ‘understanding’ and ‘content’ to listen to Eleanor’s terms. The laughter of the house here ripples ‘up and down’ Eleanor’s back, but the spectral knocking stops when Eleanor commands it to do so. In a later, similar scene of knocking, Theodora tries the same tactic of persuasion but has no effect. ‘“It can’t get in,” Theodora was whispering over and over, her eyes on the door, “it can’t get in, don’t let it get in, it can’t get in—” The shaking stopped, the door was quiet, and a little caressing touch began on the doorknob’[36]. While the knocking ceases, the presence continues seeking an entrance to the room, and no conversation occurs.

Unlike Eleanor, Theodora cannot control the spirit. Her repeated whisper of ‘it can’t get in’ is a plea rather than a command. The house does not respond to her as it does to Eleanor. The laughter of the house infects Eleanor.

Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled inside Eleanor […] she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought. [37]

The ‘possessing’ that Eleanor envisions places her as owner of Hill House, although only in spirit. She has begun her process of uniting with the house, falling completely under its spell and loving it. Unexplained giddiness fills the inhabitants of Hill House with laughter, hiding the troubling truth of Eleanor’s waning sanity under a delusional, cheerful conversation. Their joy affects the architecture of the house as well: ‘their laughter rocked Hill House’[38]. Since Eleanor and the house are connected, Eleanor’s laughter ricochets through the walls of the house, just as the ghostly laughter shuddered up and down her back when she sat in Theo’s bed. Leading up to her final unification with the house, Eleanor hears singing in the parlour:

‘Go walking through the valley, […] Go in and out the windows, […] Go forth and face your lover, […] As we have done before. …’ [39]

This song beckons her to perform what the ghosts of the house ‘have done before’; they have picnicked in the valley, shut the windows, and walked through the house knocking on doors. Eleanor’s ‘lover’ is Hill House, and she must obey its command.

Hill House has waited for Eleanor and welcomes her into its chill embrace.

The house ‘was waiting for her, evil, but patient. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought, remembering her song at last, and laughed, […] Hill House came around her in a rush; she was enshadowed’[40]. The refrain of ‘journeys end in lovers meeting’ adds a creepily romantic undertone to Eleanor’s relationship with the house. The house ‘came around her’ like a living creature capable of movement; ‘enshadowed’, she is enveloped in an uncanny embrace by the house: one which she cannot and will not escape. After the first haunting, Eleanor remarks, ‘The sense was that it wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house, maybe’[41]. Eleanor’s subjectivity slides away after she spends more time in Hill House; the emotions and wishes of the house begin to affect her, and, conversely, she has an effect on the hauntings of the house. 

‘Now we are going to have a new noise, Eleanor thought, listening to the inside of her head; it is changing. The pounding has stopped, as though it had proved ineffectual, and there was now a swift movement up and down the hall, as of an animal pacing back and forth with unbelievable impatience, watching first one door and then another, and there was the little babbling murmur which Eleanor remembered; Am I doing it? she wondered quickly, is that me? And heard the tiny laughter beyond the door, mocking her.’[42]

‘Am I doing it?’ can be read as referring to either the ‘babbling’ laughter or the ‘pounding’ itself. Eleanor’s connection with the house has become so strong that she loses the delineation of where she ends and where the house begins. The house is ‘mocking’ Eleanor’s confusion here, as if encouraging her to surrender all attempts to separate herself from Hill House and, instead, to succumb to it fully. In a moment of fear, she does just that: ‘I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; whatever it wants of me it can have. “I’ll come”’[43]. At this declaration, the haunting ends. ‘The room was perfectly quiet,’[44] and the space between Eleanor and Hill House has dissolved. She is Hill House, and she has complete access to its architectural space. ‘I can hear everything, all over the house, she wanted to tell them.’[45] The separation between Eleanor and the house blurs in the language of the narrative as well.

‘Poor house, Eleanor thought, I had forgotten Eleanor; now they will have to open their doors’ [46].

‘House’ and ‘Eleanor’ are synonyms here; ‘poor’ Eleanor forgot herself in the house. After rescuing Eleanor from falling off the veranda (an action that foreshadows his rescuing her from the tower), Luke says: ‘This damnable house, […] You have to watch it every minute.’[47] This passage can be read as referring to Eleanor, who must be watched by the other group members closely or she will succumb to the seduction of the house. Thus, Eleanor and the house blur once again in subjectivity, becoming one or double. Theodora also participates in this subliminal blurring of house and Eleanor. After one of the hauntings, she says, ‘“How nice that it didn’t mar the woodwork, […] I couldn’t bear it if this dear old house got hurt.” She grinned at Eleanor.’[48] By grinning at Eleanor after making this statement, she connects her to Hill House and its woodwork. Eleanor comments on this merging as well: ‘I have broken the spell of Hill House and somehow come inside. I am home’[49]. ‘Home’, for Eleanor, is a space that envelops, subsumes, and endangers her.

The climax of the novel blurs the delineation between Eleanor and Hill House completely. Eleanor follows the spectral song that commanded her in the parlour: ‘Laughing, Eleanor followed, running soundlessly down the hall to the nursery doorway […] and knocked, pounding with her fists.’[50] She has become one of the house’s ghosts. She goes in and out of doors and windows, follows the veranda around the house, and finally enters the tower:

She came to the tower, held so tightly in the embrace of the house, in the straining grip of the house, and walked slowly past its gray stones, not allowed to touch even the outside. Then she turned and stood before the great doorway; the door was closed again, and she put out her hand and opened it effortlessly. Thus I enter Hill House, she told herself, and stepped inside as though it were her own.[51]

The last part of Hill House closed off to her, the tower marks the final step in Eleanor’s assimilation with Hill House. The juxtaposition of ‘the embrace of the house’ and ‘the straining grip of the house’ note Hill House’s conflicting auras of security and danger, first mimicking a warm hug and then a strangling hold. Likewise, the house’s ‘grip’ on Eleanor feels simultaneously loving and murderous. Notably, Eleanor opens the door ‘effortlessly’, contrasting with her struggles to move its heavy weight in the past. The boundary between her physical form and that of the house blurs, and she begins to control the woodwork as if it were part of her own flesh. When she ‘stepped inside as though it were her own’, she claims Hill House as it has claimed her.

Symbiotic, their relationship has reached its final stage, and all that is left is for Eleanor to commit to staying with the house forever.

When the group tries to place Eleanor in her car and usher her back to her sister, she says, ‘“Walled up alive.” Eleanor began to laugh at their stone faces. “Walled up alive,” she said. “I want to stay here.”’[52] While the others have faces of ‘stone’ like a wall, Eleanor is the one ‘walled up alive’ within the house. She cannot leave because she is Hill House. The only escape – if an escape it can be called – is death. ‘Hill House is not as easy as they are; just by telling me to go away they can’t make me leave, not if Hill House means me to stay. […] I won’t go, and Hill House belongs to me.’[53] Eleanor repeats her statement of ownership of the house that she initiated during her spectral entrance the night before. Rather than thinking Hill House has consumed her, she believes she has conquered it. However, the final moments of her life expose the faults in this belief: ‘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?’[54] Ultimately, Eleanor stays at Hill House, but Hill House remains unchanged by her. She cannot own it but can only become it. Hill House essentially eats Eleanor alive, preventing her from leaving by erasing her sense of self until she and the house are one.

Hill House eats Eleanor alive.

By corrupting the image of the house, designed to contain and subjugate women, Shirley Jackson exposes the danger of patriarchal forces and advocates for increased freedom for women outside the domestic sphere. Writing in the 1950s, as Graley Herren notes, ‘Jackson deconstructs the domestic position she occupies. […] Rather than depicting the home as a woman’s natural and proper sphere – a welcoming, protective, nurturing space for the ‘angel of the house’ – Jackson depicts Hill House as a danger zone where women are haunted, hunted, and consumed’[55]. Even in the twenty-first century, Jackson’s writing poses a powerful reminder of the dangers of subjugating one half of the population to unfair confinement and restrictions. Through the Gothic and the uncanny, readers are forced to re-examine their own conceptions of what makes a ‘home’. In The Haunting of Hill House, the death and dissolution of Eleanor in a home that was designed to ensnare her (under the guise of a protective roof) prompt a feminist reckoning and encourage the formation of a futurity in which women no longer struggle to find their own space outside the sphere of the home.

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[1] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. by David McClintok (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 1-2.

[2] Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: the House as Subject (New York: Palgrave Macmilan US, 2015), p. 2 (emphasis mine).

[3] Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 169.

[4] Dale Bailey, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), p. 8; Soon, p. 7.

[5] Amanda Bingham Solomon, ‘Haunting the Imagination: The Haunted House as a Figure of Dark Space in American Culture’ (unpublished masters thesis, Brigham Young University, 2012), p. 27.

[6] Soon, p. 1.

[7] Luke Reid, ‘Domestic Architecture and the Matrophobic Gothic’, in Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, ed. by Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson (London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2020), pp. 77-95 (p. 77).

[8] Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2009), p. 38.

[9] Jackson, p. 35.

[10] Jackson, p. 34.

[11] Jackson, p. 97.

[12] Jackson, p. 97.

[13] Jackson, p. 48.

[14] Jackson, p. 153.

[15] Jackson, pp. 3, 246.

[16] Graley Herren, ‘Shades of Shakespeare in the Queering of Hill House’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62.2 (2021), 152-165 (p. 154); Soon, p. 2; Reid, pp. 89-90.

[17] Richard Pascal, ‘Walking Alone Together: Family Monsters in The Haunting of Hill House’, Studies in the Novel, 46.4 (2014), 464-485 (p. 465).

[18] Jackson, p. 230.

[19] Jackson, p. 4.

[20] Jackson, p. 6.

[21] Jackson, p. 33.

[22] Jackson, p. 42.

[23] Jackson, p. 146.

[24] Jackson, p. 127.

[25] Lynne Evans, ‘‘Help Eleanor Come Home’: Monstrous Maternity in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 50.1 (2020), 102-120 (p. 104-6); Reid, pp. 82-83; Herren, p. 159.

[26] Jackson, p. 151.

[27] Alexandra Warwick, ‘Lost Cities: London’s Apocalypse’, in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, ed. by Glennis Byron and David Punter (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 73-87 (p. 79).

[28] Tymon Adamczewski, ‘“I do not much observe pictures”, or looking and images in Horaze Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto’, Image & Narrative, 18.3 (2017), 18-29 (p. 26).

[29] Jackson, p. 242.

[30] Jackson, p. 7.

[31] Jackson, p. 7.

[32] Jackson, p. 240.

[33] Jackson, p. 7.

[34] Jackson, p. 134.

[35] Jackson, p. 131.

[36] Jackson, p. 201.

[37] Jackson, p. 141.

[38] Jackson, p. 143.

[39] Jackson, pp. 225-26.

[40] Jackson, p. 36.

[41] Jackson, p. 139.

[42] Jackson, p. 202.

[43] Jackson, p. 204.

[44] Jackson, p. 204.

[45] Jackson, p. 206.

[46] Jackson, p. 229.

[47] Jackson, p. 113.

[48] Jackson, p. 133.

[49] Jackson, p. 232.

[50] Jackson, p. 228.

[51] Jackson, p. 231.

[52] Jackson, p. 240.

[53] Jackson, p. 245.

[54] Jackson, p. 246.

[55] Herren, p. 157.