The Haunting of Hill House
(Part One)
Feelings are the least interesting things about art. Tragically, they also define it: some swell of emotion enlivens a representation, making it splinter in the memory, fixing the unconscious structure of attractions and resistances that abstract themselves to us as judgements. Atmospheric. Depressing. Tedious. Abstract feelings mnemonically index the artwork, and its label becomes its object. The experience is the reality; the memory is the experience; the mnemonic is the memory. Now, as all of these at once, the artwork is intelligible to us, and our experience of it can be communicated.
But we also know, not particularly deep down, that no experience, however powerfully remembered, can ever be reexperienced, and that its memory is trapped in our heads where no one else can feel the feeling that (literally, in the way a dictionary definition acts on its term) gives it meaning. We know we’re stuck describing the shadows of feelings, mutually pretending to be talking about the same thing in order to avoid talking, impossibly, about the abyssal loneliness of private experience.
Generally and abstractly, I remember The Haunting of Hill House to be great. Specifically and concretely, I remember its heroine Eleanor driving past a porch adorned with two stone lions:
Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself; in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front. Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every morning I patted their heads good night, and once a week I washed their faces and manes and paws with warm water and soda and cleaned between their teeth with a swab.
When I think of the novel, I recall this desperate reverie. “I have finally taken a step”, Eleanor tells herself, but here her newfound freedom reminds her that she is nevertheless confined to live one life, and worse, that it must be her own. So, in the theatre of her imagination, she watches herself love and care for the stone lions, and I love and care for Eleanor as I watch her watching.
But these private feelings have no bearing on why the novel is great. It’s great because it knows this. Eleanor and I are doing the same thing, and when the sinister environment of Hill House acts on her, it also acts on me. Because whatever Hill House is, it's not a metaphor: there, against its hills, Shirley Jackson created a machine that takes our crystals of feeling, the fantasies and attachments that represent us to ourselves, and denatures, untethers, and undoes them, whether we’re fictional characters or not.
It’s not necessary to love Eleanor, but we are under pressure to pity her. This is not the conventional pressure one feels in melodrama, which we may desire like a commodity or resist as a manipulation. We are thrown, rather, into the kind of human drama that makes us lost for words when an acquaintance is too honest about how they’re going. “The only person in the world [Eleanor] genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister”. But then, “she had no friends … owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother”. In order to marry and become a mother, her sister Carrie has robbed Eleanor of the early part of a normal life. At the start of the novel, by refusing to let her “borrow” the car they co-own, she now denies Eleanor the chance to finally start her own journey, even in her freedom as an orphan.
So we understand how “hate” finds its way from Eleanor’s nervous system into Jackson’s peculiarly dispassionate free-indirect style. Dispassionate narration need not imply objectivity, however, and Shirley Jackson is not an author likely to cosign (or even bring to the verbal surface of her narrative) her heroine’s envious regard for the normal domestic script. Moreover, if the romance of the stone lions carries some note of Eleanor’s being, perhaps, not necessarily equipped to up sticks and chase her dreams unsupervised, this is not by accident. Why does she need the car? For a live-in haunted house experience, advertised in the classifieds by a man claiming to be a scientist. “Perhaps, Eleanor’s sister whispered in the privacy of the marital bedroom, perhaps Dr. Montague—if that really was his name, after all—perhaps this Dr. Montague used these women for some—well—experiments.” Carrie’s motives, like Eleanor’s, are crossed with pettiness, selfishness, inconsideration—relational desire-lines cut by an unspeakable family history—but her arguments are not wrong.
The first thing to understand about Hill House is its opposition, not to the comforting simplicity of some disenchanted pedestrian reality, but to the latter’s impossible complexity. Life, for the sisters, cannot be confronted directly: Eleanor must imagine her sister as something hateable, and Carrie must imagine hers as pathologically naive, each judgement shoring up one self at the other’s expense without requiring either to acknowledge the possibility that something else, some Gothic enclosure vaster and more cloistering than any haunted castle, has cast them in roles and directed their action. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”.
But “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within”. Is the house insane because, like Eleanor’s hatred for Carrie and love for the stone lions, it serves as an anodyne fantasy, an object able to reflect the self back to itself in favourable light? Eleanor hopes so. When she drives there, her daydreams are direct and indirect daydreams of her destination, projections of the great self she will soon finally become. “Perhaps Hill House has a tower”, she imagines, “or a secret chamber, or even a passageway going off into the hills and probably used by smugglers”. She is Emily St. Aubert, commanding her own carriage to the castle of Udolpho. Unhappily, the house’s mode of insanity soon annihilates her own:
The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
To be continued...