Hill+House+Symbolism

Kim Christian Ackerman 12 May 2008 American Literature: Honors

Summary Response

In This article, Carol Cleveland rambles on about the different women in Shirley Jackson’s novel, and from this she describes three women one of which is Eleanor Vance from The Haunting of Hill House. In the article she describes Eleanor’s mental problems as pertaining to the house and she says that Jackson created “a genuine ghost story with strong roots in psychological realism”(Cleveland). She goes on to explain Eleanor’s relationship with the house, a central theme of the book and an intriguing motif. She goes on to explain that the only thing that can save Eleanor from this wounded mental state she is in, is to be accepted and the house does this. She further pushes this point when she comments about Eleanor’s obsession with the word’s “ Journey’s end in lovers’ meeting” (Jackson 14). Cleveland claims that the house is in the end Eleanor’s lover, because it is the one place that she can feel at peace.

Throughout Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, she stresses Eleanor’s yearning for acceptance, and Eleanor’s idea that “Journeys end in lovers’ meeting”(Jackson 14). In "Shirley Jackson. And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of Mystery ”, by Carol Cleveland she furthers this motif of the lover and comes to the conclusion that the house itself is the lover. This symbol of a lover is a place of comfort or acceptance for Eleanor, and is a symbol that since she at first has no lover she is only half a person; the lover fills in the other half. Through the novel this motif is prevalent as well as Eleanor’s search of the guest’s in Hill House for her “lover.” Through out Eleanor’s search, she finds a strange peacefulness with the house, while at the same time having feelings of strong fear and wishes to be out of the house, “… [Eleanor] found herself at the same time unable to account for the excitement she felt, which made it difficult to remember why it was so odd to wake up happy in the Hill House” (95). This quote presents Eleanor’s joy for the house already on only the second day at the place. The side that finds the peace with Hill House also falls in love with Hill House. In the last few chapters of the novel, Eleanor explains that she can hear everything in the house and she can feel everything. These emotions lead back to this symbol of the house as her lover, she has finally met it, and has become one with it, hearing what it “hears” and feeling what it “feels”. Once she unifies with the house, she becomes hysterical, and the other guests have no choice but to ask her to leave. Her final moments show her attachment to the house when she will not leave. Instead she chooses her grave, and to stay with her lover, “Journeys end in lovers’ meeting”(14).

In The Haunting of Hill House, The Bird's Nest and Hangsaman, Jackson gives the reader portraits of three young women in various degrees of mental and emotional disarray, which has been caused or exacerbated by their families. Eleanor Vance, Natalie Waite and Elizabeth Richmond are all entering on the same crucial phase of their growth—the last step into the adult world as independent people. All find themselves coming seriously apart when confronted with this task. Jackson had a strong penchant for mixing genres and reversing conventional expectations. In The Haunting Of Hill House, she takes a tired formula from the gothic romance and turns it inside out to tell a genuine ghost story with strong roots in psychological realism. The classic gothic formula brings a vulnerable young girl to an isolated mansion with a reputation for ghosts, exposes her to a few weird happenings to heighten the suspense, then explains the “supernatural” away by a perfectly human, if evil, plot and leaves the heroine in the strong arms of the hero. In House, the heroine is exceedingly vulnerable, the weird happenings quite real, the house really haunted. Eleanor Vance, as unmarried daughters have been expected to do, has spent her youth taking care of a bedridden mother. This has “left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking.” Eleanor's sister and brother-in-law have rewarded her for this long and faithful service with a cot in their daughter's bedroom and half interest in a car. The “strong sunlight” that Eleanor blinks at is normal life; she is incapable of relaxed adult conversation; she is desperate for an independent, satisfying life, and she is almost completely without the means of achieving it. She has so little experience that she will take anything offered. What fate offers is Hill House, which is mad. She is summoned by Dr. John Montague to be part of a ghost-hunting house party. She has been chosen because of a poltergeist incident dating from her adolescence. Jackson assumes that poltergeist phenomena happen, that they are the result of repressed emotion and that Eleanor is author and victim of the increasingly frightening events that follow the installation of the party of four at Hill House. Jackson also assumes that houses and other locales can be the centers of evil associations—wells of misery and agony waiting for suitably tenuous human beings to drink from them. What Eleanor needs in order to have any hope of survival is a place to belong, where she is welcome for herself, not suffered as a duty. Hill House welcomes her. She is exactly the personality it has been waiting for. It is the house, with its doors that shut by themselves, rendering the casual guest simultaneously trapped and lost, that drives Eleanor past her ability to understand or cope with her own emotions. Her fellow ghost-hunters are very ordinary people, ill equipped to understand the despairing love affair that develops between Eleanor and the perverse house. What they can understand is her need for human relationship and they reject it. Their responses, individually and as a group, to Eleanor's deterioration constitute another social sacrifice, less violent than the conclusion of “The Lottery” but just as effective. (pp. 201-03) Eleanor passes by stages from her first terrified revulsion at the house to basking in what she feels to be its warmth and acceptance of her. From horror at the scrawled message that appears in the hall one morning, “Help Eleanor Come Home,” she progresses to a state of intimate awareness of the life and breath of the house, including its older ghosts. She has almost reached this stage when Mrs. John Montague arrives for the weekend, a stock comic treatment of the insensitive battle-ax. Mrs. Montague's system of belief in planchette messages is so perfect that she is impervious to the real manifestations of Eleanor's progress from a living, if fragile, human being, to genuine ghostliness. To Mrs. Montague is given the task of summing up, with detailed dramatic irony, the process of Eleanor's dematerialization. She addresses her husband: Perhaps you do not feel the urgency which I do, the terrible compulsion to aid whatever poor souls wander restlessly here; perhaps you find me foolish in my sympathy for them, perhaps I am even ludicrous in your eyes because I can spare a tear for a lost abandoned soul, left without any helping hand; pure love—. A few hours later, when Eleanor has been rescued from probable suicide at the invitation of the house, Mrs. Montague asks, “with great delicacy,” “Does anybody agree with me ... in thinking that this young woman has given us quite enough trouble tonight?” A few hours later, Eleanor is dead. She crashes her car into the tree at the bottom of the drive, happy that she has found a way to stay at Hill House —happy except for a few questions that flick through her mind at the end: “ Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?” One of Jackson's favorite devices is to give her characters tags from nursery rhymes or ballads that run like refrains through their minds and may also comment upon plot or theme. Eleanor's refrain is “journeys end in lovers meeting.” This is the last reversal of gothic convention, but not the final irony. Eleanor has met her lover; the house has desired her far more than her family or society as represented by her fellow ghost-hunters. As elsewhere in Jackson's world, those whose death society finds convenient do in fact die, having been sentenced to it long before by lethal inattention. As long as Eleanor had some slight use as nurse or psychic sensitive, she was tolerated. As soon as she began to demand full attention, to disturb the peace, it became necessary to dispense with her completely. Resources : Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York. Penguin Books, 1959. Cleveland, Carol. "Shirley Jackson." And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of Mystery. Ed. Jane S. Bakerman Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. 199-219. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 60. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. 199-219. Literature Resource Center. Gale. ARAPAHOE HIGH SCHOOL. 12 May 2008 < http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=litt24484>.

Rubenstein, Roberta. "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 15.2 (Fall 1996) 309-331. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 187. Detroit: Gale, 2007. 309-331. Literature Resource Center. Gale. ARAPAHOE HIGH SCHOOL. 12 May 2008 < http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=litt24484>. ( has an interesting fixation of mother’s and daughters as a symbol of the book.)

Questions : 1. What was the most interesting part of the novel, relating to how the 50’s were versus how they were conveyed in the novel? What was shown what was not? 2. What do you think the different colors in the different rooms symbolized? (Remember: Eleanor’s room was blue, Theo’s was green, the Doctor’s was yellow, and Luke’s was pink.) 3. Shirley Jackson both opens the book and closes it with the lines, “Hill House not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hills House, and whatever walked there, walked alone” (Jackson 3). What does this suggest to the reader about the Hill house? About author intent? What message do we receive knowing that the story both begins and ends with the same lines? 4. Who at the end of the novel are the lovers? Is Eleanor paired with the house because it is the only thing that accepts her? Why does she choose the house? What are the prominent motifs of Hill House? Where does the plot unfold in the novel, and what main themes shape the storyline?