PART TWO continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/the-haunting-of-hill-house-shirley-jackson/
My other reviews of Shirley Jackson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/
My reviews of older and classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this novel my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
FOUR
2 & 3
“With her eyes almost closed she could see Theodora only as a mass of colour sitting on the floor.”
A crucial scene, perhaps. I shall concentrate on it despite possible spoilers. E and T alone together. A potential afternoon nap recommended by Dr M, for who knows what the night might bring? A calm before the storm?
T says to E: “I dislike being with women of no colour.”
I mentioned red shoes and toes earlier in my review for no reason at all, now, as disturbingly to E, T paints E’s toes red to make her colourful, too, while E dozes! A squabble later between them about this.
T: “‘I’m an idiot. Just something frightened me for a minute.’ She stood up and stretched.”
4, 5 & 6
“‘If I had a passion for doors,’ he said, ‘or gilded clocks, or miniatures; if I wanted a Turkish corner of my own, I would very likely regard Hill House as a fairyland of beauty.’”
Here is more entitled leisure …
“‘If she wants to leave before dark she has to clear away in the morning,’ Theodora said without interest. ‘I’m certainly not going to do it.’”
And ends with brandy at 4 a.m. for all 4.
In between are some of the most frightening scenes in literature — if you let them. If you remember them.
Aide Memoires…
“‘Hill House, Hill House, Hill House,’”… someone imitates HH whispering its own name, as if scolding me for calling it a mansion! No more shall I do so.
Black Michael & Clarissa Harlowe.
“‘Bang’ is the best word for it; it sounds like something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall…’”
“…wondering what secret terror had been tapped in the others,…”
And not forgetting the intense cold spot outside the nursery.
6
FIVE
1
‘Now I know why people scream, because I think I’m going to,’
This is where we face, as readers, refrains and repeated incantations of ‘bang’ and knockings on the wall and invasive coldnesses, pervaded by recurrent descriptions as we are enfolded by the book’s text, just as Eleanor is by hugging the house itself. And who wrote the chalk message, come morning, on the wall? Even though, I think we are told who did it.
And this expresses my own feeling exactly in reading this book…
“…we were frightened, certainly, and found the experience unpleasant while it was going on, and yet I cannot remember that I felt in any physical danger;”
No, not ‘unpleasant’, pleasantly unpleasant, more like.
“‘I could say,’ Eleanor put in, smiling, ‘ “All three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real.” ’”
How many quotation marks I need to insulate what I quote? There is indeed a difference between ghosts and poltergeists. And I think of Eleanor’s childhood ‘stones’ now built to become this house?
“…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;”
Stones and Hill House: A stillhouse to distil hellishness and loutishness? Or shoutlines, houselines, even holinesses?
2
“The light reflected from the stained-glass window on the stair landing and made shattered fragments of blue and orange and green on the dark wood of the hall.”
This section seemed at first to be a gentle intermission in what I might once have called a MAROON PARTY at the house, although ‘mansion’ would have been a more assonant word here than house in this context , and just as I tripped over myself in so saying, the above colours seemed to become a single different colour, one that was more lethal and liquid, indeed, all over T’s bedroom door and clothes, indeed desecrating T’s bedroom with another worded message, causing E and T to plan sharing a bedroom and clothes as twins or cousins. While we await the arrival of Dr M’s wife ‘the day after tomorrow’, as he put it, while still plugging on with his READING RICHARDSON, now with ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, having presumably leapfrogged ‘Clarissa Harlowe’?
3 & 4
“I would like to hit her with a stick, Eleanor thought, looking down on Theodora’s head beside her chair; I would like to batter her with rocks.”
Things take more serious and complex turns as E’s thoughts turn autonomously against herself, and even E’s name is not her own name TO own. And T and E, alone together, hold hands or do they? — at the incessant gurgling of the seemingly child-like voice during a darkness that even a lit light could not disperse. What have I got into here? It was cosy horror, but now it is not? Or am I being punished for calling HH a mansion, when it is not? Or am I simply being punished for taking fiction so seriously beyond its remit of entertainment? Or am I entertaining IT? And by doing so, entertaining myself?
E: “‘When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the carefully woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid I no longer exist in any relation to these things. I suppose because things are not afraid.’”
SIX
1 & 2
“; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings;”
Some serious thoughts by E in interface with Luke about the nature of humanity and ‘the pathways to the heart’, evoking more of these characters’ personalities than heretofore, while L announces an impossible truth, i.e. he never had a mother. The unearthing of Hugh Crain’s scrapbook for his daughter is a dark eye-opener on how he gaslit her with the threat of Hell. No wonder HH seems to behave as possessing — or being possessed by — more Hell than Heaven. On Leap Year Day today.
3
“They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other’s knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor’s arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved.”
After the ‘pathways to the heart’ mentioned earlier, T and E have an inchoate Sapphic squabble while walking together into darker realms outside, to the extent the two men worry about where they are. I mentioned, earlier, too, a Maroon Party (not the colour but the isolation) — which is an old term for an extended picnic over days, and lo! — T and E think they see an idyllic family picnic in the woods…
“; the grass was richly, thickly green, the flowers were coloured red and orange and yellow, the sky was blue and gold, and one child wore a scarlet jumper…”
And then, tellingly, ‘half-buried stones’…
“…stumbled, sobbing, over half-buried stones and what might have been a broken cup.”
Note: a ‘cup of stars’ with which reference this section started.
SEVEN
1 & 2
“; books are frequently very good carriers, you know.”
Planchettes, too, words being the carriers of ghosts? Whether automatic writing or deliberate. The arrival of the breezy and officious Mrs M (wife of Dr M), with headmaster Arthur Parker as chauffeur, causes an off-putting glitch for the still nervous Luke and the two girls in the flow of events, but this woman and her toady are worth their weight in gold if they are mere spear-carriers, I say. We shall see what the words do write henceforth. I noted amongst the lady’s luggage there was a blue suitcas
3
“Planchette felt very strongly about a nun, John. Perhaps something of the sort—a dark, vague figure,…’”
A comic intermission? As Mrs M refers to ‘planchette’ as a christian name of someone she knows, and Merrigot summoned for Arthur or for Nell, and there is pencil talk of walled-in nuns, or even perhaps Lewis’s Monk? Or a plangent echo of the author herself…
“…what I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories.”
4
Mrs M:
“…the beings in this house are only waiting for an opportunity to tell their stories and free themselves from the burden of their sorrow.”
But the opposing view — “if I ever saw a place that had no use for perfect love, it’s Hill House” — prevails with the house structure’s convulsions that have now invented sound-blocking headphones for our Nell with loud discordant Stockhausen from within them…
“; how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head? I am disappearing inch by inch into this house,..”
Did Nell invent these convulsion that the others felt, too, or did the splinter group of Mrs M and Arthur in other rooms with the gauche stories of Mrs M? Mrs M perfect wife to Dr M except, seemingly, for this one vice to trigger such strong hauntings with her dear Planchette of platitudes.
EIGHT
1, 2 & 3
“, but Hill House is not for ever, you know.”
Or is it? Eleanor’s silent monologue as narration without being a first person singular. Self-evidently a famous passage of literature-as-truth, without my having read it before. But nobody reads books any more, so how can any of its words be for ever? E’s determination to leave here and go home with T to T’s home, to quell E’s apartness, but there are ghosts even involved outside HH as she is followed by a non-existent couple: Luke and Theo, laughing together, while they were setting up their own maroon party elsewhere. And still E did not receive the message. Luke’s earlier talk of Pan and the house being all globes and “Little soft glass hands, curving out to you, beckoning——“, or was that him at all saying that? His talk of smashing globes when he finally inherited ownership of HH. The twosomes, that of Theo and Luke budding, but, in contrast, why did not Dr M and his wife share a room while she was here visiting at HH? Surely E was not to be remaindered with Arthur? Or abandoned here alone to become herself a ghost of it? But, I have noted for future reference: “…the fluted iridescent candy jar at Theo’s elbow.”
4 – 8
“‘I am Eleanor,’ Theo said, ‘because I am wearing blue. I love my love with an E because she is ethereal. Her name is Eleanor, and she lives in expectation.’”
The letter E seems right, though N would do, too, I guess. The lethal Grattan song sung by L is contrasted by the gentle child-like ghost E alone feels towards the end of this section and that ghost’s own song.
But then different comic foils recur with the antics of Mrs M & A & ‘planchette’, the latter supposedly over-sensitive to scepticism — and Mrs D always clearing off on the dot!
“‘That pretty Theodora lady is old enough to take care of herself, I’d think, no matter how gay Mr Luke.’”
***
E: “She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood ageing. […] ….she could not hear the books rotting or rust seeping into the circular iron stairway to the tower.”
And, later, I note she could hear the child-like ghost…. “None of them heard it, she thought with joy; nobody heard it but me.”
The reader, though, E, does hear it, rest assured.
Nine
“; I dare you to open your door and come out to see me dancing in the hall of Hill House.”
This is the perfect and most poignant climax to the maroon party as the cinematic scene of the hanging iron stairway at last apotheosises Theo and Thee as concomitant with my sense of this book’s mansion as tantamount to a prehensile Hanging Rock.
“Theodora was wearing Eleanor’s red sweater. […] ‘We never had our picnic,’…”
END
Cf Eleanor’s childhood ‘stones’ poltergeist as this potential rock?
My past review of the Joan Lindsay novel: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/picnic-at-hanging-rock-joan-lindsay/