HALLOWEEN BOOK CLUB: the Haunting of Hill House

To reply to a two-year old thread, as I mentioned in the comment above, I just finished reading The Haunting of Hill House this morning (after reading a couple of Jackson's other novels and a bunch of her short stories in October), and I thought it was fantastic.  One thing I really appreciate about having read some of her (still brilliant) earlier work is how Jackson's writing style evolved over time, from the very dense prose of Hangsaman (I haven't read her first novel, The Road Through the Wall yet) to the more minimalist prose of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  Both styles are brilliant, but it's amazing how incredibly beautiful the prose of her last two novels is and how perfectly written just about every sentence of the book is.  There's not really even any like stray sentences that I can point to and say as being inelegantly phrased.  So the book is just a joy to read on a purely aesthetic level. 

Beyond that, while I think Icecream Planet's two year old comment about how quickly the book reads, I feel like there's a lot to unpack in this book, probably more so than any of Jackson's novels, and I think this is going to be a book that I will end up rereading a lot.  On a fairly surface level, it's a good horror novel that doesn't rely on cheap scares that have no point to them besides being frightening.  More sustantively, the characters are incredibly well realized.  As MLA noted earlier in the thread, Jackson's initial descriptions of Dr. Montague, Theodora, and Luke are all brilliant, and each do a fantastic job of summing up so much about them in just a few sentences each, and yet all three prove to be interesting, complex characters beyond those brilliant initial sketches.  But it's the exploration of Eleanor's psyche which is probably the most brilliant aspect of the book.  As in all of the her novels that I've read, Jackson does a masterful job of making you empathize with her characters, in spite of their detachment from reality, inability to interact with other people in a healthy manner, and (especially in the case of We Have Always Lived in the Castle) their own ugly and disturbing attitudes towards other people, and this is especially true of Eleanor.  Her oscillations between being happier than she's ever been and entirely at ease with the people she sees as her new friends at Hill House, alternating with the inevitable panic and dread following every encounter with said friends that she's made a fool of herself is heartbreaking, and rings really true to life (also, MLA's point about how we can't fully trust Eleanor's perceptions of how the others are treating her because of how bad she is at interpreting social interactions is a really good one, and reminds me of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which does the same thing with its main character).  It's even more heartbreaking, when, finally, she is rejected by the others at the end of the book, and ultimately evicted from Hill House.  (As an aside, while she spends the vast majority of the book inside of Eleanor's head, Jackson's initial description of Eleanor is no less pithy than her description of the other main characters.  Here are the first three sentences written about her:  "Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House.  The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now thather mother was dead, was her sister.  She disliked her broher-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends."  It's equally depressing and hilarious, but it's also a simple statement of facts that nevertheless sums up a lot of importance about Eleanor to this point in her life.)

But there's definitely a lot more going on in the book than just an exploration of Eleanor's psyche.  All of Jackson's novels that I've read explore events and feelings which are kept unsaid and repressed.  On one level, the main character always has some sort of terrible even that they are trying to avoid thinking about (in this case, it's Eleanor's guilt over not having brought her mother her medicine on the night that she died), and it's about an exploration of the human psyche.  But you can interpret this on a number of other levels.  Like Hill House can be seen as a metaphor for a deeply inhumane American society which is fundamentally inhumane on a structural level.  The idea of a structurally suspect building being allowed to remain standing with at best cosmetic and ineffectual attempts to fix its issues is a recurring motif in Jackson's writing (it's very hard to read the first paragraph of The Bird's Nest, for example, and not see it as a commentary on American society, at least in the year 2017).  So the wholly inadequately addressed issues with Hill House, be it the hauntings or the disorienting nature of the geometry of the house's structure itself, can be seen as a commentary on structural iniquities left unaddressed or at the very least insufficiently amended in American society.

You can also definitely analyze the book through the lens of Eleanor's and Theodora's relationship.  I agree with MLA, it seems like Theodora (and also Eleanor) are either gay or bisexual.  So in keeping with the book's theme of things being hidden and left unsaid, the house can be seen as a sort of metaphor for being closeted.  While the gender of Theodora's friend back home is left unclear, as is the nature of her relationship with this friend.  Furthermore, later on in the book, when Eleanor states that she intends to come and live with Theodora, Theodora responds, "Look"..."this is just a summer, just a few weeks' visit to a lovely old summer resort in the country.  You have your life back home, I have my life.  When the summer is over, we go back.  We'll write each other, of course, and maybe visit, but Hill House is not forever, you know."  Of course, it's ambiguous as to what Theodora actually means here.  She may genuinely not be interested in Eleanor at all, or maybe she is interested in her but is understandably taken aback by her announcing her intention (without even asking Theodora's opinion on the matter) for them to live together after they've known each other for only about a week.  On the other hand, Theodora's statement can be seen as her saying that their relationship must be kept a secret, impermanent, and fleeting thing.