Shirley Jackson - The Haunting Of Hill House - Episode 2 - Is Hill House Haunted Or Not?! - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting Of Hill House - Episode 2 - Is Hill House Haunted Or Not?!

 

I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

 

And I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  

 

Read the first paragraph of chapter 2. 

 

That is the first paragraph of chapter 2 of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.  This is episode 2 as we explore this haunted space- and Christy, haunted it is.  Last week, we spent a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson and her relationship with her mother.  It was our argument that a lot of the terror she creates springs originally from the dysfunction of living with a toxic mother.  We introduced the idea of reality versus illusion and the difficulty of knowing one from the other- especially in these toxic relationships.  We introduced the idea of feeling trapped and alone.  All of these feelings metaphorically expressing themselves not just in the characters who populate the story, but also in the physical space- the haunted house itself.   

 

And Jackson borrowed from every gothic trope she could find to build for us a very relatable creepy house-  it’s so stereotypical, we have to wonder if that in itself is part of her strategy- which of course, it very much is.   But, why?  What is she expressing? Of course, we know that haunted houses do express evil and fear and always have. We, also know that houses, in and of themselves, occupy a very important place in our psyche.  As people, we have an incredibly powerful psychological attachment to the physical spaces that populate our lives.  Physical spaces can bring us memories; as in favorite vacation destinations, they can be sacred as in a church, and they can also be haunted.  Let me quote Dr. Montague as he explained the origins of haunted houses to his assistants in chapter 3  

 

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Jackson, herself, was always interested in houses- and for good reason.  Her grandfather had been a very important architect  in San Francisco, and she brought all of that family interest into her own life.  Jackson wanted to write a ghost story and then she set out to write Hill House, so, I guess it just made sense for her to research a bunch of different houses in order to create the one for her story.  She even enlisted her mother to help her get some research about a famous haunted house in San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House- one that still attracts millions of visitors visit every year.   

 

I also happened to notice that Dr. Montague directly references this very famous house.  I wish I can say I had heard of it, but I hadn’t, so I looked it up.  A woman by the name of Sarah Winchester inherited $20 million in 1881 from her dead husband and his family who had made their money selling firearms.  She was said to have moved to California to build a home for the spirits of the dead people who had been killed by the firearms made by her husband’s family.  The Winchester house is really bizarre and worth Googling.  I can see why it has so many visitors.  It is enormous: 24,000 square feet; it has 10,000 windows, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 160 rooms, and 17 chimneys among other things.   

 

It’s weird looking too with all those turrets that remind us of what a proper haunted house should look like,  and Jackson studied it and her house has turrets, but Hill House isn’t just one house, and it’s not near as large as the Winchester House.  It’s funny how many theories there are about what all inspired Hill House.  Stanley, Shirley’s husband worked as a professor at a woman’s college, I’m not sure we got to that last episode, but he worked at Bennington College in Vermont.  Well the Music building on campus is called Jennings Hall, and it is apart from the other buildings.  It’s made from gray stone and stands against the hills, kind of like the opening of Hill House.   Lots of people see that connection. Ruth Franklin, Jackson’s most recent biographer and probably the leading expert on all things Jackson, talks about a file she found in Jackson’s archive at the Library of Congress when she was researching Jackson’s life.  She found a collection of pictures and newspaper clippings about all these different places and events that inspired Hill House.  One was a newpaper article about a poltergeist incident in Long island, there were pictures of a couple of castles, there was the Winchester house stuff, but then she found one called the Edward H Everett Mansion- which is also in Vermont, and actually very near Bennington where Jackson and her family lived.  Franklin and her husband went there when she was researching for her book on Jackson and were basically shocked at how evil that house looked.  She and her husband both got chills just being on the property, so Franklin believes a lot of Hill House is inspired by that place.   

 

At the end of the day, Hill House is the invention of Shirley Jackson’s mind- not a specific place on earth.  It is also a creepy ole’ metaphor for something- and when you’re reading the book by chapter 4 where we go to in this episode - you don’t know what it could be- but you intuitively feel it has to have something to do with a home- but definitely not a happy home- but maybe a place that should have been happy but is twisted, but maybe it is even a place that promised to be happy or to be something- but it lied about that.  I think when we read novels, especially the ones we like, sometimes we don’t really know what we identify with- we just feel some sort of connection.  I think that’s the big question in this book- especially at the beginning.  What am I supposed to make of this house?  Why am I compelled to read about it?   If it’s so creepy why does Eleanor stay there?  What compels her to go inside? What’s attracting her there?  Is it just that it’s not her sister’s house so anything is better than that?  Is she looking for a home?  As we read further on, we will come to understand that that is exactly what it is all about.  Of course, for all of us- having a home is important.  Wouldn’t you agree, with Bing Crosby, Garry, that there’s no place like home for the holidays? 

 

Homes and thus families are important, there’s a lot of psychological research to support that, of course.  But let’s just narrow in on the idea of that physical space we associate with our home- where we currently are living and hopefully nesting.  For many of us, if we are going to make it our home- and not just a place where we sleep and maybe eat, a home is part of our self-definition- it is that physical space that expresses who we really are.  That’s why decorating a home in your own way and making it beautiful to YOU is so important.  It’s why I encourage people, even if you’re wealthy enough to hire professional decorators, to be involved in that process in a personal way.  Most of us, however, don’t have that problem, but we should make our home reflective of our interests, our passions, our tastes.  We should let it reflect OUR identity- in a positive way.  It’s also true and I quote Robert Frost here, “Home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  That’s another very important idea.  It is a place where you feel safe, and you can be oriented in space and time.  It’s a place where you can be vulnerable without being exploited.  But that’s where the dangers reside, right?  If you are vulnerable, then by definition, you can be exploited- and of course, that happens, and it definitely happened to Shirley Jackson. 

 

For me, a house really does has a spirit to it.  As strange as that sounds, especially if someone has lived in the same place for a while.  In some sense, a physical space has to develop its own energy and personality.  This is what I mean, Garry and I got married when my oldest daughter was a junior in college.  When she entered our new house- her new home, even though we put her things in a room, put her pictures on the wall, and tried to make her feel “at home”, she just didn’t bond with the physical space.  She was living at college in a house of her own, and she was spending just a few days a year with us.  Her room at our house was nice; it was beautiful; but the house just wasn’t her friend yet.  A full year later, we had a house fire, and I was in tears as things burned, thankfully just one room truly burned before we stopped the fire, but Anna was very stoic about the whole thing.  She just couldn’t be sad.  She told me, point blank, I don’t feel anything.  I don’t feel like this is my space.  This isn’t my home.  Of course this made me sad because I wanted her to feel at home there in our space with her sister and step-father, but it wasn’t something I had any power to create.   There were no memories in that space for her at that time, and the only that that would ever change that is creating memories for that space in that space- of course, the fire ironically was a memory for us all- but it really is about the passing of time and what we do with the passing of time.  Living there- bringing friends there, filling up the air with the smell of food and the fire place, sharing meals together- playing games around the table- the house has had to develop a spirit of its own- and hopefully a positive safe and welcoming one and hopefully one that is still being developed. 

 

Of course you’re right.  That is why it’s important to be intentional about that sort of thing because just as a space can be positive, it can also be negative.  And just as it can have a positive effect on a person, it can have a negative one as well- obviously.  

 

William Sax, Professor of anthropology, says it this way: People and places where they reside engage in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system.”  Listen to what he means- people and places engage with each other- they interact with each other and have effects on each other- they are part of one single interactive system.  It’s a very interesting way of looking at how we engage the world.  This is true.  It’s originally a Southeast Asian concept, but it really nails a universal truth. 

 

 Of course it’s that very idea that I also see Jackson taking and running wild with it in her book- physical space interacting actively with the people who occupy its space.   

 

Reading here how Jackson plays around with the concept of this house is really a hyperbolized version of spaces interacting with people- and in her case, she builds an entire 80 year history of negative memories in this house.  Here, crazy enough, the house actually is a villain- although I know that’s not totally obvious by the end of chapter 4- but even early on before the house spooks a single person when we read the history of the house, we can see how much negative emotions and hurt are a part of the spirit of this house.  

 

For sure, Jackson makes Hill House into a literal character in the story.  This house has emotions.  She tells us explicitly this house is without kindness and has no concession to humanity- not unlike her own mother (as we saw last episode).  She goes on to say Hill house is not fit for love or for hope- that’s how Jackson literally describes it.  But unlike a real house in the real world, what makes this fictional story creepy is that we are going to see that the house has agency- or it at least appears to.  The house does stuff- or maybe it does stuff- that’s the big unanswered question.  Who’s doing the stuff in the house.  Either way, Of course, this is all the opposite sort of things we want in our physical home, and I’m sure almost everyone would agree with that.   And let’s be mindful here.  Shirley Jackson spent a lot of time thinking about her house.  She spent a lot of time, in fact, most of her time, thinking about her home.  She was first and foremost a homemaker. And she was extremely intentional about what she invested her time in.  She did a lot of cooking- and neglected a lot of cleaning opting to make her space a fun liveable one, contrary to popular standards and practices of her time.  She, probably better than most writers or any genre at any time, knew exactly how powerful a home was and could be and how a person could frame it.  Heck, she financed her entire life out of humorously discussing hers.  Her house was famously vibrant, full of life, full of energy, full of visitors- both celebrated literary friends of hers, as well as the dozens of childhood playmates that continuously bounced between the walls.  She clearly knew how to make a happy home, but here in this book, she strips all of that positive away and we see she also knew what a house without kindness could be like.    

 

So interesting.  What’s also interesting to me is that historically, this haunted house archetype goes back hundreds of years, well before Jackson came on the scene.  We all know this, I mean who hasn’t seen pictures of those gloomy castles in old Gothic stories.  We all know those houses that wreaked havoc on Victorian readers, on Scooby Doo readers, on all of us.  I’ve read several of these to my own kids over the years, And now that I think about it, all these haunted houses kind of look like Hill House, they usually have two stories maybe a turret or tower, but for sure a black cat on a porch, bats coming out a window, and full moon somewhere behind it.   

 

So true,  I think I’ve even mailed one or two Halloween cards with those very images on them, but literary haunted houses are slightly differently than the Scooby Doo thing.  In literary fiction authors use these Gothic tropes, and I’m going to put Jackson in this group, to create some sort of metaphor, to flesh out something moral or psychological- and this makes the inside of the house much scarier than the outside- as creepy as these pictures are.  The house represents something inside that is scary and that really exists in our world.  So the question is, what about this house scares us?  What are we really afraid of?  What are the ghosts? 

 

And for me, although, I know this is totally a non-literature way of looking at things, to answer that question I find myself looking at Shirley Jackson as a person and the world she lived in.  Shirley Jackson was a woman of the 1950s, she was a writer and commentator and a deep thinker about that world.  She was a daughter, as we discussed last week, but she was also a mother herself.  And the definition of motherhood in the 1950s was very unique in American history because, and I talked about this a little last episode, but there was a giant shift after WW2 for the American family and especially for women.  Last episode, I talked about that second wave of feminism and Jackson as a professional woman may have looked at all of that, but today I want to bring up another important and that is this idea of the postwar rush to the suburbs and America’s cult of the family- that is a very big distinctive historically about this time period. And it in fact, it is still very much a part of our American identity, even to this day.  After WW2, life changed for almost everyone in a positive way.  Life wasn’t as hard as it had been before the war.  People could own a home; everyone seemed to want a family.  It was a status symbol.  We all wanted a particular kind of family- the nuclear family with a mom and a dad and children who were the product of that marriage.   

 

That’s not just an American thing- isn’t that what everyone aspires to all over the world even today.   

 

Of course- but for America, in this post World War 2 era, everything was changing and prospering in a new way and so this was not a pipe dream- it was attainable in a way that had NEVER been possible before.  Think about Of Mice and Men and how destitute things were during the depression.  That was all over.  Now- People had time to think about things like competitive living.  Before that we all were just trying not to starve.  We also had mass media that was projecting what prosperity looked like, or at least should look like.  This kind of atomic family was the picture of happiness.  This social framework was on the covers of all the magazines, in all the movies, in all the tv shows.  It was sanctioned by our churches, and how good or successful we were as humans depended on how well we created this particular family.  If your family wasn’t this kind of family, we used the word “broken”.  You came from a broken home.  I know this very personally because this was my reality.  I was raised in a “broken” home.  My parents were divorced- although I’m not from the 50s, but even during my childhood this was a very shameful thing for a child- something was wrong with you, with your family, with your home.  Shirley Jackson’s home wasn’t physically broken at all- at least not in the way that mine was, but the appearance of perfection haunted her from her earliest memories.  Her parents were in hot pursuit of that perfection.  And as an adult when she was homemaking she was very aware of all of these family and social dynamics at work.  Almost all of her writings center around these ideas in one way or another, the fiction and the non-fiction.   

 

So, back to Hill House, if we look at a home your way, as a place where individuals are supposed to belong- let’s look at these characters from that perspective of why they might be showing up at Hill House.  Because the characters in this story are definitely not coming from that background.  They are all broken, if we pay close attention.  We see that Eleanor doesn’t have a father or now a mother.  Theo is very vague about her identity, even about who she lives with- we don’t even know if her roommate is a man or  a woman, the only thing she lets out in her introductory comments is about spending her vacations alone at boarding school which is kind of dark, and Luke will claim later on to not having a mother.  So, I guess, none of them really have a place to go for the holidays, to use the language from Bing Crosby’s song.  When they get to Hill House, although the house itself is creepy, they seem happy to have found each other.  The lure of having what this house may be offering is greater than the risk of what could be scary about it being haunted.  The girls even wear bright colors to brighten up the dreary home; they run outside, the house is in a valley and kind of covered up, but they also claim it’s a “place for picnics”, something happy families do- and of course, we’ll see at the end of the book that this parody of the picnic will come back to haunt both girls. In the beginning, Eleanor and Theo claim to be cousins and the last sentence of chapter 2 is, “Would you let them separate us now?  Now that we’ve found out we’re cousins?”.   

 

When they meet Luke in chapter 3, Eleanor very quickly asks, “Then you’re one of the family? The people who own Hill House? Not one of Doctor Montague’s guests?”  Of course, she doesn’t mean her own family- but for Eleanor- in some ways that is what she is fantasizing about- this notion of family- a place to call home.   

 

Let me also point out that by this point in the story, even though, we’re still in the very beginning, the house has already played a benign trick on Eleanor and Theo- there was an incident about a rabbit frightening them.  It’s cute and funny but odd none the less.  Hill House, for Eleanor, although is obviously ugly, vile and haunted, is not an unhappy place.  It holds promise.  When they come in and meet Dr. Montague, he pours drinks for everyone and Eleanor comments, “Everything’s so strange, I mean, this morning I was wondering what Hill House would be like, and now I can’t believe that it’s real, and we’re here.”  She struggles to believe it, but as she sits with the other three and the thought she has is this and I quote, “I am the fourth person in this room; I am one of them; I belong.” 

 

And of course, all of the conversation between the four of them is fun-loving.  They make jokes about what they do in the other world.  Almost all of it is non-sense.  Eleanor talks about being the talk of café’s, Luke says he is a bullfighter, Theo claims to be clad in silk and gold.   

 

Yes, and Dr. Montague assumes the role of a a traditional father-figure.  He calls them children and tells them stories.  Let’s read that part.  They all sit around, and he tells the story of Hill House. 

 

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It’s definitely a creepy story and the Crain family is definitely a miserable group of people, but getting to the current moment if Mr. Montague is the father-fugure, Luke, Theo and Eleanor are the kids, then in some sense the house is the mother- there’s no one else.  But from the history of the house, there was never really a real mother that ever lived here. 

 

Yes- and that brings me back to my discussion of the 1950s.  Before the 50s, life in the United States was more difficult.  Many people we’re struggling to exist- mostly fighting mother nature on a farm or a ranch.  When wealth came to the United States in that post war era, like we already said forming an ideal family and an ideal home was at the heart of that- but at the heart of the home were the children.  A new word showed up in the Webster dictionary in 1958 that had never existed in English before- that is the word, “parenting”.  And whatever it meant, parenting was about the responsibility of making perfect kids or at least making a perfect growing up experience for kids, and how to do that was naturally- again in very American form- supercontroversial and divisive.  There was this book that came out in 1944 by a doctor by the name of Dr. Benjamin Spock.  This book took America by storm.  In his book, he claimed parents should not discipline their children.  They should be permissive.  The idea before this was that humans were evil, and children were humans, so they needed to be disciplined or tamed into doing right- if you indulged them you would “spoil” them- that was the word.  Dr. Spock took the opposite approach, his theory was that all of us are good and it is not possible to spoil a child.  A child who is loved will never be spoiled by things you give him/her or do for him/her.  If they had everything they needed, they didn’t need to act out or misbehave.  In either case, no matter which side of the argument you fell on- one thing both camps had in common was the child was the center of the home. Everything was about the children.  

 

And this was where Shirley Jackson, the mother, fit in.  Look at the titles of her two books of essays about her children, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Jackson took seriously this debate about “parenting”.  In 1960 she wrote a book titled “Special Delivery, a Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers”.  Let me read a small quote from an essay in there called, “Whos’ the Boss?” 

 

“After Careful study it is going to be clear to the earnest mother that the enormous propaganda on child raising in books, magazins, and even adverstisments is being largely written by babies.  Baby is the boss, the articles point out flatly; first you are waiting for him, an dthe you are waiting on him.  Perhaps this is because 20 or 25 years ago the going rage in baby care was exactly the opposite.  Children who were allowed a little freedom of choice were going to be ‘spoiled’ and the worse possible thing an anguished mother could do was pick up a crying baby. In our family there is a sharp division of opinion on the question of the authority of the child.  Our four children ardently support he cause of absolute indulgence, warmly seconded by their grandparents on both sides.  My husband and I, bolstering one another secretly with reminders that we are firm, righteous, fair, stem although impartial, band beyond all else the heads of the family, have managed to fight the issue to a standstill somewhere between the two camps.” 

 

She is funny.   

 

She definitely is, and even in Hill House, there are parts of the dialogue that are really funny- especially when we get to the parts about Mrs. Montague who is absolutely absurd.  But here’s where I want to land.  Eleanor is our central character- no doubt.  We are wedded to her point of view.  There is no doubt that the allure of Hill House is also her desire for a family- to not be alone- one of the creepier elements for me in this book is Eleanor’s constant revisiting the phrase “Journeys end in lovers meeting”.  I think it’s repeated 14 times, maybe more than that.  

 

Yeah- what is that about. 

 

Well, of course, we never really know.  It’s actually a quote from Shakepeare’s play 12th Night.  Which is a comedy about a girl named Viola.  12th Night is very typical Shakespeare, I actually just watched it at a Shakespeare in the park this summer in Nashville.  It’s a happy play and after a lot of misteps and misidentities Viola finds true love at the end.  The Journey for Viola ended in a lovers meeting.  But the way Jackson uses it isn’t like the way Shakespeare uses it at all.  It really is not used in any kind of romantic sense.  Eleanor wants to meet love, but I’m not sure she’s very particular as to the kind of love she meets.  It doesn’t have to be sexual, for sure.  Although there’s a little bit of flirtation with Luke, it definitely ends poorly. This is a very asexual book.  In fact, the most graphic sexual part has to do with the demented Hugh Crain and his abusive relationship with his daughters.  Eleanor is looking for a family- she wants to be the center of someone’s world, and that is normal and understandable, but she’s also a bratty kid in many ways.  She’s judgmental of everyone else, we will see.  Jackson is going to create every member of this family of Hill House to be dysfunctional and self-orbiting.  Every member of the family is tyrranically trying to be in control- and notice that is what Dr. Montague pointed out in the history of the house.  Hugh Crain, who built the house, is a horrible father- he parented his daughters as we find out late in the book- through sheer terror.  The house is a horrible mother, it’s oppressive and vile and deceitful- but the Crain kids were terrible too.  They were competitive and hurtful.  And now we get these “kids” – if that is what we’re going to call Luke, Theo and Eleanor- are going to all three be portrayed as self-centered and competitive.  Dr. Montague in this playful exchange at dinner says this and notice Jackson’s carefully chosen words, “You are three willful, spoiled children who are prepared to nag me for your bedtime story.”  Jackson uses the loaded language of her generation- words everyone in the 1950s would recognize.   

 

So are you saying, Jackson is saying, children are tyrranical as well as mothers?  Is everyone tyrranical?   

 

Well, I really don’t know if I’m ready to comment on that yet but maybe.  I want to point out something though that IS interesting.  Both Theo and Eleanor were selected to come to the house because they supposedly have powers, Theo has telepathic power and Eleanor can create these poltergeist experiences where we can move things around- maybe subconsciously even.  This, I think is an important detail to include.  They are not powerless, and Jackson leaves room we will see to see both of them exercising their powers at various places in the book, maybe.   

 

What do you mean by that?  That they may be using their powers or maybe they aren’t, we can’t be sure? 

 

That’s it exactly- and we’re not even sure if they know if they are using their powers- they seem not to really understand that they have them. Now, let’s go back and think about the HOUSE itself- As the story sets itself up in the exposition, four very different people have moved into the house.  The only thing they have in common is that they all have some sort of brokenness in the background, even Dr. Montague as we will find out when we meet his hideous wife, but they all are willing to move into a house that is supposedly haunted- but how and by whom?  And what are they going to do in the house.  Of course this question comes up in their evening together- their first bonding experience sharing food and drink together- and Dr. Montague confesses that he has no idea what will happen to them.  They will take notes, but that is all he can offer. They will drink brandy- as Luke points out- they are there to drink spirits- pardon the pun.  And they most certainly will.   Before they go to bed that first night, Theo and Eleanor share the stories of where they come from.  Let’s read this part. 

 

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What is interesting about that exchange is that we, as readers, already know Eleanor is lying.  None of what she just told them is true.  Things at Hill House are not what they appear to be.  In chapter 4 when they tour the house, Dr. Montague makes a point of pointing that out.   

 

Page 77  

 

Much of chapter 4 is describing the house- and the house is off- you can’t see it at first- but it’s off center.  There is a fairly large distortion because so much is off. There’s also the marble statue of Mr. Crain, the veranda that’s crooked, the cold spot in front of the nursery ironically which is symbolically in the middle of the house, and then the chapter ends with noises. This is the first really scary part in the book.  Eleanor apparently wakes up with someone calling her.  She thinks it’s her mother at first before she remembers she’s at Hill House.  When she goes to Theo’s room Theo is scared out of her mind because she’s heard someone knocking, plus it’s terribly cold.  The noise gets louder until Eleanor shouts wildly, “Go away, go away!”  The door trembles and shakes against the hinges and ultimately they hear a little giggle and a whisper and a laugh before the Dr. and Luke get to them. 

 

That is all very creepy and very definitely the stuff scary movies are made of.   

 

Yes, and chapter 4 ends with Dr. Montague’s observation. 

 

- read  ending pg 99 

 

Whatever is pressuring the house- is pressuring this little make shift family to break up.  

 

 But then again, no one ever knows what forces  are at work in any family dynamic. Do we?  What kind of subversive forces are at work in a house, in a home… in a home that is haunted? 

 

Ha!  Good point Jackson.  I guess we often never do.   

 

Well, that’s terrifying enough for one episode.  We will pick up with chapter 5 next time and see just what exactly Jackson is doing with our minds.  Thanks for spending time with us as we explore the terrifying world Jackson has created at Hill House.  As always please tell your friends about us, push out an episode on your twitter account, or your Facebook account.  Text an episode to a friend.  If you’re a teacher and want to use podcasts for instruction, go to our website and download a listening guide for your students to fill out as they listen.  We want to support learning around the world, and helping us share the world is how you can help us grow.  Thank you  

 

Peace out.  

 

 

 

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