“Fear and guilt are sisters” — this simple declaration comes mid-way through Haunting of Hill House as Eleanor and Theodora decide to go wandering out in the middle of the night. Author Shirley Jackson appears at first glance to be portraying both women as either emotion, as they are locked in a sort of childish standoff, so fixated on remaining engaged in their emotions that they don’t seem to notice that they were traipsing out of Hill House at night — at night! — into the god-knows-what horror.
In the Netflix TV series version, that line is uttered by Theodora’s lover, sitting atop her in a dream-like mind-trap sequence that is designed to kill her. I’ve seen the show at least thrice, and every time that line pops up, I’m mystified by its placement and by who says it. Why did they have a scantily clad woman say that to Theodora, someone who’s so enmeshed in her sisters’ lives whether she wants to be or not? Is Netflix Theodora supposed to represent guilt in this instance, for not picking up Nellie’s final phone call? Would that make Nellie fear?
That line in Mike Flanagan’s Haunting always struck me as odd, and after a recent Christmas rewatch, I decided it was time to stop being a horror wimp, and just read the book it was based on. And boy, was it something else.
No, like really, the book is completely different from the show — Eleanor and Theodora aren’t sisters, and Luke isn’t their brother. Also, Haunting of Hill House á la Jackson takes place over the course of about a week, while Flanagan’s version jumps between childhood and adulthood for the Crain siblings, who — based on storytelling evidently well-informed by modern therapy — are all royally messed up after spending a summer at a haunted mansion.
And while it was very, very cool to be able to recognize all the references, I’m going to try my best to review Shirley Jackson’s book as a standalone because it really packs a punch. Because man, can this woman write.
She opens with a single paragraph introducing Hill House — “not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within” — and then jumps straight to describing Dr. John Montague, a doctor of philosophy who “had been looking for an honestly haunted house all his life”. He gathers a group of people who’ve had odd things happen to them and bring them to Hill House to stay for the summer (he rented) so that he can scientifically record what happens there. The two people responding to his request were Eleanor Vance — an honest-to-god real weirdo who had experienced a storm of rocks battering her home when she was a child — and Theodora, a maybe-psychic who my brain kept picturing as Catherine Zeta-Jones because of the 90s movie. The third person in the group was Luke Sanderson, part of the family that now owns Hill House. He was supposed to act as a chaperone as Montague conducted his experiments.
Much of the story is told from Eleanor’s point of view. It isn’t necessarily an unpleasant place to be, but is definitely an unreliable one. Right off the bat, as she’s driving to Hill House, she is established as someone who is deeply unhappy with her life. She bizarrely fixated on a child at a restaurant wanting to drink out of a cup of stars, and turned it into a monologue in her mind about how the girl must “insist” on it.
Once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it.”
I mean, what is going on here, Eleanor? That was literally what I kept thinking as I read through the beginning pages of her introduction. Every time her brain skipped down a memory lane, it was just weighed down with foreboding and warning — and this was before we even got to the haunted mansion.
Once at Hill House, it becomes so clear that it is very much a character in the book. And it’s not haunted in a “huh, maybe it’s a bit off” way — oh no, it’s straight-up menacing. The minute Eleanor sets eyes on it, that little voice inside of her that was playful and lilting goes straight into defensive mode — “beyond everything else she was afraid, listening to the sick voice inside her which whispered Get away from here, get away”
But this is what I came so far to find, she told herself; I can’t go back.”
And later, as her bags are brought to her bedroom and she crosses to the window and looks down at her car outside “which could take her away again”, she convinced herself to stay, using an oft-repeated refrain:
Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought; it was my own choice to come. Then she realised that she was afraid to go back across that room”
Listen, if I felt that strongly a way about a place I was going to have to sleep at, I would like to think I’d have the good sense to just peace out (this reminds me of a hotel thread I read once on Twitter about how every hotel has “problem” rooms, whereby if a guest came to the staff and said, “I’d like to switch rooms”, the staff can just do it if it’s one of those rooms, no questions asked. And it’s always those rooms.)
But how many times have we been in situations where we ignore the nagging voice, and decide to just power through anyway? That was the sense I got about Eleanor’s entire persona — she does things that she’s expected of, even if she doesn’t like it, and after a lifetime of doing what she was never offered a choice to refuse (care for her infirm mother), she is completely unable to figure out what it is she does want. So when the voice tells her to GTFO, Eleanor Vance does not know how to listen to it.
Theodora is completely different. Chosen by Dr. Montague because she’s maybe a bit psychic, she is painted as a chatty, vivacious woman, who Eleanor thinks is “thoughtlessly, luckily lovely”. She has a “roommate” in the city, she owns pants (this is when women didn’t really wear pants, I guess), and she laughs when Eleanor asked if she is married. Also, the chill that Eleanor felt in her bedroom completely dissipated when Theodora stepped into the next door room.
By the time they were skipping out the house to explore the green expanse, and joking about picnic snacks and talking in a weird old-timey way, I was like, “Wait a second, is Hill House gay???” (I was so tickled by it that I kind of read and missed the first ghostly “sighting” out by the brook.) No doubt there’s been numerous theses written about the repressed lesbian undertones of Jackson’s novel, but me — being a completely uncultured couth — I had no clue. Seriously, I was shocked. And once I sensed it, I couldn’t unsee it.
So when we get to Eleanor and Theo’s second wander out of Hill House — in the middle of the night! (seriously I can’t get over how lackadaisical everyone is about night wanders especially since they know it’s a haunted house) — I was just reading it as a lovers’ spat. To me, it was a jealousy-tinged tete-a-tete between a self-aware queer woman and her repressed lover-to-be who is experiencing attention (and possibly friendship) for the first time and doesn’t quite know how to express her emotions in a healthy way.
Like come on, look at this:
Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question and, once spoken, such a question — as “Do you love me? — could never be answered or forgotten.”
I mean, see? Totally gay!
When “fear and guilt are sisters” is flung out so perfectly by Jackson here, it is clear to me that neither woman represents the emotion. They actually exist on either side of the coin for Eleanor, who becomes increasingly unhinged the longer she stays in Hill House.
Theodora, who was on day one seen as not just an ally but a forever friend [insert roll eyes emoji], becomes absolutely detestable to Eleanor by (maybe) day four. She is regarded as mean, isolating, and cruel, while Luke — who appeared silly in the beginning and a possible romantic interest (poor Eleanor has clearly never had positive attention) — becomes self-centered in Eleanor’s eyes by mid-week.
On a walk with Theo and Luke, she chatters about her past and her relationship with her mother — she even confesses the very thing that sends her fear/guilt coin spinning — and then asks “Are you talking about me?” as they lag behind her in their walk, her thoughts flicking from desperation to quiet happiness that she will soon have a future life with Theo. And, once she is alone because Theo and Luke did not follow her, Eleanor’s extended brush with God-Knows-What leaves her thinking “Don’t let me go, and then, Stay, stay, as the firmness which held her slipped away, leaving her and fading”.
The mad thing about this whole book is that it takes place over only about a course of a week. Because we as readers live solely in Eleanor’s head, her point of view makes things feel like it’s been going on much longer — almost like summer camp, where you feel like soulmates with your bunk buddies by day two because you’re spending all your time together. But I got frustrated real quickly by the massive gaps — like how Eleanor wouldn’t describe why she was lying outside on the grass alone, daydreaming. Like girl, why are you by yourself? Do you have no self-preservation instincts? Is this happening for real, or in your head?
So while some of her social isolation feels like it’s happening over a long period of time — and therefore, a tad justified if she’s doing weird stuff every single day — it is possible that from another perspective, it is abrupt. I would be so curious to see this from Theo’s point of view because there are some indications that she — the psychic, remember — could read Eleanor more clearly. Like on day one of the stay, she was the one who tells Eleanor that perhaps she shouldn’t be staying at Hill House.
I’ve realized that in all the words I’ve written so far, I’ve fixated more on the weird stuff happening outside the house rather than within its walls. Rest assured, there’s tons of scary stuff happening inside, but what is creepiest about Haunting isn’t really the things that go bang at night, or the writings that appear on the wall (“Eleanor come home”). It is the off-kilter feeling one gets when they get increasingly ostracised in an unknown situation, and when that setting is a house hungry for you, then yes, being unmoored and untethered can have fatal consequences.
(Or actually, maybe the most terrifying is Eleanor clasping Theo’s hand in bed in the dark, “holding so tight she could feel the fine bones of Theodora’s fingers” as she laid frightened in silence by ghostly crying, only to realize when the lights come on that it wasn’t Theo.)
Haunting of Hill House is definitely something I’ll have to reread, slower the second time around. I devoured it in three sittings — I was so hungry for clues into where Eleanor’s head was at that sometimes I didn’t even realize I had stumbled upon a ghostly encounter. And while the ending isn’t unexpected, everything that made up this book — the writing; the careful yet verbose characterisations; the weight of what was not said, not written — was a revelation. It stuck with me long after, popping up in quiet moments, like when I lie awake in bed trying to will myself to sleep.