Hill+House+Biographical+Analysis

=A Biographical Point of View=

[|H1000049481&docType=GALE||The Nitty Gritty] [|H1200000291&docType=GALE|In Depth]


 * Sorry for the funky links!

Main article and response:
Introduction to //The Haunting of Hill House//, by Laura Miller


 * Shirley Jackson often wrote about solitary, mousy young women**... Jackson's attraction to stories that pair fragile, lonely girls with more daring alter egos continued after the //Haunting of HIll House//... It may come as a surprise, then, that although Jackson did love big old houses, **she wrote her novels of spooky isolation from the midst of a large, boisterous family**. With her husband, the notable critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson presided over a household that included four children, an indeterminate number of cats, and an endless rotation of guests and visitors... **At times, their life resembled a continuous party, fueled, to the detriment of their health, by liberal amounts of alcohol, rich food, and cigarettes**...


 * As a writer, Jackson developed a lucrative sideline producing witty autobiographical sketches of her endearingly chaotic family life for women's magazines.** The pieces, collected in two popular volumes, //Life Among the Savages// and //Raising Demons//, were how some of her readers knew her best. The contrast between these essentially sunny vignettes and Jackson's much darker fiction--especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since--must have baffled those fans who came to her work from the pages of //Good Housekeeping//. **Shirley Jackson's two authorial personas were equally authentic; she prided herself as much on her generous mothering and culinary skills as on her cool literary examinations of human wickedness. Still, the difficulty of integrating these contradictory selves surely contributed to the way the women in her novels tend to come in pairs.**

It's striking, for example, that a writer who depicted the sisterly bond with such passion had no sister of her own. Jackson was born, in 1916, to handsome middle-class parents in San Francisco and raised with her younger brother in one of the city's affluent suburbs. **To her elegant, conventional mother, Jackson--ungainly, eccentric, brilliant, and plain--was a perennial vexation. The relationship would torment Jackson, too, for the rest of her life.** She would alternate between defying her parents (by marrying a Jew, by refusing to live up to her mother's standards of grooming, by becoming fat) and trying to outdo them... **The demanding, cold, and critical mothers who figure in Jackson's fiction, including Eleanor's own dead-but-not-gone parent, owe much to Geraldine Jackson.**

...Most of the faculty [of Bennington College, where Hyman was working] lived in on-campus housing, but Jackson insisted on living in town. It was a choice that perpetuated her outsider status. Jackson didn't want to be subsumed into the college as a faculty wife, but she didn't fit into old rural New England either. **Xenophobic, tight-lipped, and possibly inbred Yankee country folk begin to make appearances in her fiction at this point.** A small town in Vermont is the setting for "The Lottery." and the town square where the locals gather to ritually stone to death one of their citizens was based on the square in North Bennington. **Jackson told one friend the story was about anti-Semitism, a prejudice she felt keenly in North Bennington**...

The houses were another matter. In //Life Among the Savages//, Jackson combined into one the family's two beloved houses... in North Bennington. She descried this slightly phantasmagorical composite home as "old, noisy and full," a marked contrast to HIll House, with its empty halls and prenatural silence. **But Jackson also saw her houses as having wills of their own, including insistent ideas about how their rooms should be arranged.** "After a few vain attempts at imposing our own angular order on things," she wrote, "with a consequent out-of-jointness and shrieking disharmony that set our teeth on edge, we gave in to the old furniture and let things settle where they would...

Jackson's ghost story [Hill House], published in 1959, was a hit; it became a bestseller, the critics praised it, and the movie rights sold for a goodly sum. T**he incipient madness of Eleanor Vance seemed to affect her creator, though--or perhaps it was the other way around... Jackson, a mercurial personality at best and aggravated by the prescription amphetamines she took like aspirin, experienced her won psychic disintegration not long after finishing that final nove**l [//We Have Always LIved in the Castle//], a breakdown triggered when one of her husband's many affairs with Bennington students took an uncharacteristically serious turn. Eventually, Jackson pulled herself together with the help of a psychiatrist, but the burden of so many years of bad habits proved to be harder to conquer. She died in her sleep, of cardiac arrest, at age forty-eight.

__Summary__:

In this introduction, Laura Miller analyzes The Haunting of Hill House based on Shirley Jackson’s life and experiences. For example, Miller cites such aspects of Jackson’s life as her poor relationship with her mother, her separate writing career and her experiences in rural New England as essential, foundational elements of Jackson’s writing. Miller emphasizes the fact that most of Jackson’s female characters had a “dual characterization:” all are naturally meek but are expected to fulfill heroic roles. This, Miller implies, had to do with Jackson’s dual authorship as both a sunny, satirical writer and a grim, insightful writer.

__Response__:

According to Laura Miller in her introduction to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, few authors can write a novel without pouring their souls into their respective books; various life experiences, she argued, contributed to Jackson’s insightful analysis of the human psyche. For example, Miller makes the point that Jackson created negative mother characters based on her own relationship with her real-life mother: “To her elegant, conventional mother, Jackson--ungainly, eccentric, brilliant, and plain--was a perennial vexation. The relationship would torment Jackson, too, for the rest of her life… The demanding, cold, and critical mothers who figure in Jackson's fiction, including Eleanor's own dead-but-not-gone parent, owe much to Geraldine Jackson.” Similarly, many of the cynical, thought-provoking situations in Jackson’s books were based on her opinion of the inherent villainy of mankind: “Jackson didn't want to be subsumed into the college as a faculty wife, but she didn't fit into old rural New England either. Xenophobic, tight-lipped, and possibly inbred Yankee country folk begin to make appearances in her fiction at this point. A small town in Vermont is the setting for ‘The Lottery.’ and the town square where the locals gather to ritually stone to death one of their citizens was based on the square in North Bennington.” Finally, and most significantly, Miller emphasized the importance of Jackson’s dual life (one life of positive, pleasant writings and another of grim horror writings) in her writing: “Shirley Jackson's two authorial personas were equally authentic; she prided herself as much on her generous mothering and culinary skills as on her cool literary examinations of human wickedness. Still, the difficulty of integrating these contradictory selves surely contributed to the way the women in her novels tend to come in pairs.” Thus, Shirley Jackson’s writings are esteemed in the literary world because of her ability to incorporate the inherent complexity and intricacy that forms life as we know it into her books.

Opening Activity
First, watch the two different trailers for both movie versions of The Haunting of Hill House. How are they similar? How are they different?

The 1999 Version: (Deemed "far from the book" by critics)

media type="youtube" key="eCNyzMHyfIw&hl=en" height="355"

The original 1963 version: (Follows the book more closely)

media type="youtube" key="xq74oz6mf3w&hl=en" height="355"

Based on watching both of these, what role does a person's perspective and time period play on his or her interpretation of an event? How do the different perspectives (old and modern), make the same story seem different?

Discussion Questions
1.) In the first few chapters of //The Haunting of Hill House//, how does Shirley Jackson's personal life play a part in her characters' struggles and the plot?

2.) Relating to a New Historicist perspective, how can Jackson's interpretations and portrayals of certain aspects of her books be related to some of her real life struggles?

3.) What, in your opinion, does Shirley Jackson say about society in the earliest parts of this book?

4.) What is the role of "dual" female characters so far in the book--How do the separate aspects of their personalities add to the complexity of the story?

5.) Which character seems more autobiographical to Jackson, Eleanor or Theo? Or, is it a combination?

Anna D

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