Shirley Jackson, a genius, died in bed in 1965. For forty-eight years before that, she was lonely. Jackson’s high society mother hated her for being fat and for being strange and she told Shirley this openly and often. Geraldine Jackson wanted a conventional daughter. She would have no such luck. A staggering prose stylist, Shirley Jackson made a career of writing about women equally ill-suited to fit the neat boxes in which society sought to keep them. Because the world is and has perhaps forever been – at least, certainly, in mid-20th century America it was – a gruesome place, Jackson married a chauvinist academic who resented her talent. She wrote while raising four children in Vermont. Life in small town New England informed the work for which she is most widely known, a junior high textbook staple about the ritual stoning of a woman by her ordinary neighbors, “The Lottery.” It seems the primal wound of maternal rejection rippled outwards in her like rings in the stump of a felled tree, each signifying a new way Jackson found herself apart from the surrounding world. Or, abandoning stodgy, post-hoc psychological analysis, we might imagine her cursed. Regardless, a sense of abjection kept residence within Jackson always. This is as evident in her published fiction as in her letters and personal notes. Food and booze and pills could not evict it. Creating and exploring all of the many shattered women who people her novels and stories could not exorcise it. During the final years of her life, she rarely left home at all. She wished to recover. In a journal entry months before her heart gave out Jackson wrote, “I am the captain of my fate I am the captain of my fate I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible.”
In the decades since her death, Jackson – who enjoyed some commercial success during her lifetime but was often jettisoned from the universe of serious literature, labeled merely a talented purveyor of genre schlock or, worse, to the labeler, women’s fiction – has been vigorously resurrected and canonized in certain circles (white women who went to liberal arts college, lesbians, girls and gays who have ever journaled in a cemetery, horror titan Stephen King) as a patron saint of strange girls and nervous women. The once faded, and still relatively obscure, figure of Shirley Jackson has become a Tumblr moodboard staple, an October reading list must-have, a comforting totemic figure to readers who soldier through the stifling ordinariness of their lives hiding treasonous minds and downcast hearts. Her graceful, funny stories of largely internal horrors are a salve to those who fear that their very selves are, in some small and critical way, wrong, and who might like rather a lot to blame some of that wrongness on forces beyond their control, beyond the veil, even.
I know this because I was one such Shirley Jackson acolyte, replete with torn black tights and a tearstained face. I am one even now. Years of scribbled margin notes expose me. They, we, feel as affirmed by Jackson’s consistent attention to the dark and dour parts of existence as we are thrilled by her immaculate sentences. There is an immense, eerie charm to the worlds Jackson created, these towering Victorians manors where freaky women fall apart or sew themselves up, kill and are killed. An entire micro cottage industry exists for the sale of goods which signify the buyer’s membership in this small but passionate cohort of sensitive weirdos. You can get a We Have Always Lived in the Castle necklace on Etsy. Handfuls of middle-aged depressives in coastal cities sport baseball caps embroidered with Jackson’s name. I’ve put one in my cart before. But goth-lite merchandise and spooky season listicles, while fun, can belittle the despair autopsied in Jackson’s work. I have learned, neither quickly nor easily, to beware the impulse to stylize pain; all hauntings begin with the living. There are ghosts in the house. How tiresome to claim otherwise, so much beside the point. There are ghosts, of course. Jackson’s fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House, illustrates persuasively that it is the ghosts lurking in the recesses of the self, not those wraiths that race down dark halls, which one should fear most.
I borrowed a copy of Hill House from the Amherst College library one morning on a trying, teenaged impulse. A beautiful 1987 reissue with a green cover and soft, penetrable pages to bury a fingernail in. I’d spent a restless night on the outside edge of someone else’s top bunk following a dire dorm party. I read Hill House in the grass until after dark had come and – I am embarrassed now to say, though at the time it seemed a reasonably romantic affectation – never gave the book back. I met Eleanor Vance, aged thirty-two and miserable. The difficult mother to whom she was caretaker for some dozen years has finally, mercifully died. Now Eleanor sleeps on a cot in her sister’s home (“The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.”) and waits for something, anything to happen. She is invited by letter to travel into the countryside and participate in a research project of indeterminate aim and this, to a woman starved for contact, desperate for incident, is a good enough reason to steal the car she shares with the sister and escape toward the unknown. “Eleanor, in short, would have gone anywhere.”
Dr. John Montague, an aging anthropologist with a sheepish appetite for the occult, has taken a lease on a mansion of ill-repute and invited a handful of oddballs and unlucky sorts to stay with him there and document whatever should happen. Eleanor’s selection is owed to a newspaper account of an event in her adolescence in which stones fell onto the family home for days without explanation, “dropping from the ceilings, rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof.” Eleanor, only twelve-years-old, and her sister blame each other. Their mother blames the neighbors with whom she constantly feuded. Jackson needs to press only very gently upon the reader in order to suggest a third, more spectral culprit. There is also the beautiful, mononymous Theodora, a possible psychic and definite lesbian (Theo decides to come on this adventure only after getting into such a vicious fight with her live-in, ungendered “friend” that each spitefully destroys handicrafts they’d once made as gifts for the other. So. Like I said.) whose bohemian confidence enthralls and sickens Eleanor in equal measure. Luke Sanderson, the layabout nephew of the abandoned estate’s owner, added to the doctor’s proceedings as an emissary for the family, and to the novel as the third point in a babyish and broken love triangle, completes the party. The mansion, introduced in the novel’s famous and enchanting first paragraph as, “Hill House, not sane,” is a home with a foreboding facade, an unhappy history, and walls set at angles all ever so slightly wrong.
Jackson’s locating of the third-person narration within Eleanor’s glaringly troubled point of view is the skeleton key which unlocks Hill House. From the start, the distortions in Eleanor’s fractured and fantastical relationship to the world are clear. She daydreams wildly and wilts when spoken to. Standing in her room at Hill House, Eleanor thinks, “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster.” That Hill House is sentient is never in question for Eleanor, though this knowledge is at first more unconscious than not. Later, this access to Eleanor’s thoughts will make it impossible for the reader to be certain whether a disturbance should be blamed on the malicious house or on Eleanor’s deteriorating mental state. It’s both. Always, unfailingly, it is both. Her fellow travelers, even as they too experience undeniable, frightening phenomena, increasingly suspect Eleanor of, at the very least, attention seeking. The house wants Eleanor as badly as Eleanor wants the house. Her hunger for home, love, and security rams against a revulsion toward the very same and Hill House provides a dangerously fertile field in which to wrestle with want and hate.
The bedrooms in Hill House are each done up in a single color. The blue room, the green room, the pink room, you know. Maddeningly cheery wallpaper in openly hateful rooms. The women share, at first, an adjoining bathroom and then a single room. They’re fast friends, or something that is both more and less than friends. On the first meeting they declare themselves cousins, banter about fictional shared pasts. There is a kinship which defies categorization. “Unexpectedly – although it would later become a familiar note, a recognizable attribute of what was to mean “Theodora” in Eleanor’s mind – Theodora caught at Eleanor’s thought, and answered her. “Don’t be so afraid all the time.”” Theodora paints Eleanor’s toes and the spectacle of red splashing into white makes Eleanor feel sick. Eleanor courts Theodora’s attention and then squirms in it, much as she is afraid of the house and wants to meld with its wooden beams and hulking stone.
When the intrepidly sentimental filmmaker Mike Flanagan, upon more than loosely adapting the novel into a Netflix series, turned Hill House into a family story, transforming psychosexually starcrossed strangers into traumatized siblings, Jackson purists understandably balked. Though he did soften the blow by introducing his Theo with a face wet and glowing after going down on a woman, making Theodora and Eleanor sisters does excise a crucial tension from the text. And yet, this conservative impulse was not wholly inappropriate. The Haunting of Hill House, like so much of Jackson’s writing, is concerned with the family, the home, the painful connections, and failures to connect, which exist within families, within homes. And the Hill House visitors, often in jest and other times not, do refer to themselves as a family. “You are three willful, spoiled children you are prepared to nag me for your bedtime story,” says Dr. Montague fondly on their first night. When Montague’s wife joins the proceedings several days later, equipped with an automatic writing device for ghost communication, a boorish, armed sidekick, and risible claims about approaching the dead with healing compassion, she serves as both a comic escape valve for the narrative’s mounting anxiety and a catalyst for its annihilative conclusion. It is as if Hill House will tolerate only the most malformed family. Mrs. Montague’s attempt to impress upon the house her quotidian conception of a mother’s love is firmly rebuked.“If I ever saw a place that had no use for perfect love, it’s Hill House.” Theodora pronounces as the sickly cold creeps close and the doorknobs wiggle and the researchers weather their most active night yet.
The Haunting of Hill House is a haunted house tale disinterested in the who or why of the haunting. Jackson spends no time describing ghosts or their gory provenance. Her accomplished control of tone and mood eliminate any need for that. The scares are sensory. Putrid odors, sudden chills, a pounding, pounding, pounding noise in the dead of night. It’s clothes found covered in blood except, actually, later, they’re not. Classic fare, but without the compulsory unmasking of an offender to soothe our trembling. This story is concerned with how fear acts upon a body and a mind. The forces of Hill House prey on Eleanor’s vulnerabilities, her icy childhood, her social difficulties, the myriad ways in which an adult sense of self has failed to form. Eleanor set out for Hill House as a first step into the rest of her life; upon landing in the home’s carnal unreality, her desire for agency curdles into a little girl’s fantasy of freedom without responsibility.
As Hill House’s corruptive maternal embrace emboldens Eleanor into risky behavior, the others turn against her, turn her out. The doctor with a blithe, masculine certainty, trusts that Eleanor’s problems will be remedied by a change of scenery. “”Once away from here she will be herself again; can you find your way home?” he asked Eleanor, and Eleanor laughed.” Hill House, of course, is the first true home Eleanor has ever known, and like a dependent child she has given herself up to it. Hill House’s obliterating power offers Eleanor an escape from the essential human labor of trying, with time and experience, to understand, accept, and love one’s self. It is an escape she cannot resist. She had been alone for so long. As she steers her speeding car toward a tree on the lawn Eleanor thinks, “I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me.” If she thinks anything after that, only Hill House knows. Shirley Jackson’s novel ends with a reprise of its first paragraph. Satisfying and awful, like the imperiled mind, like Hill House, her story is a closed loop. “And whatever walked there, walked alone.”
