Shirley Jackson earned her place in the literary canon — a place now so obscure that it aptly suggests the dark interior of two pages stuck together — with disturbing tales of the supernatural, the abnormal, and the socially monstrous. They somewhat resemble the tales of Walter de la Mare in their author's willingness to leave us without comfort and even without confidence in our understanding.
The Haunting of Hill House is (though one can easily forget) a story told by an authorial third-person narrator. After just a few pages, however, the narration starts getting entangled in the mind of the protagonist, Eleanor Vance.
There has to be a first time for everything, Eleanor told herself.
Though the narrative voice remains formally objective throughout the novel, it becomes possessed by Eleanor's thoughts.
After the manner of men who see women quarreling, the doctor and Luke had withdrawn, standing tight together in miserable silence; now, at last, Luke moved and spoke. "That's enough, Eleanor," he said, unbelievably, and Eleanor whirled around, stamping. "How dare you?" she said, gasping. "How dare you?"
And the doctor laughed, then, and she stared at him and then at Luke, who was smiling and watching her. What is wrong with me? she thought. Then — but they think Theodora did it on purpose, made me mad so I wouldn't be frightened; how shameful to be maneuvered that way. She covered her face and sat down in her chair.
"Nell, dear," Theodora said, "I am sorry."
I must say something, Eleanor told herself; I must show them that I am a good sport, after all; a good sport; let them think that I am ashamed of myself. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was frightened."
...
"I wondered if you two were going to come to blows," Luke said, "until I realized what Theodora was doing."
Smiling down into Theodora's bright, happy eyes, Eleanor thought, But that isn't what Theodora was doing at all.
Since the narrative is haunted by a mentally volatile protagonist, we can enjoy imagining to what extent the strange occurrences in and around Hill House may be products of her psyche. Does she positively generate those occurrences? (After all, her family was beset by poltergeists in her childhood.) Is she the originator of a psychological contagion? Is something taking place, but not what she perceives? Or has she really been summoned to a fateful encounter with the supernatural? Laura Miller, in her introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, sees reason to believe that Shirley Jackson was content with the supernatural view.
It should be said that both [Henry] James and Jackson gave every indication that they considered the ghosts in their short novels to be real within the fictional world that their books describe. Jackson, who had a lifelong interest in the occult, who dabbled in spells and liked to tell reporters that she was a witch, professed to believe in ghosts. But both of these writers were too preoccupied with the notion that people are attended by multiple, imaginary versions of themselves to be unaware of the nonsupernatural implications of their ghost stories.
So we're welcome to simply gaze at the supernatural design that's displayed before us; or to peek behind the veil and tease our brains with as many psychological puzzles as we can discern; or to draw back the ultimate veil of fiction and contemplate the psyche of the author.
Miller tells us, "Jackson seemed to see sex as an uninteresting distraction from earlier, more fundamental questions of identity." In The Haunting of Hill House, she leaves the potential for sexual dynamics among her ghost-hunters practically unexplored, though not absolutely so. When the emotionally stunted Eleanor has her head turned by the only young man in the group, Luke, it's just a flutter of puppy love. When she feels something akin to jealousy, it's just a basic craving for attention. (After spending most of her stay in Hill House wondering what the others say about her, she eavesdrops on their conversations and finds that they forget her very existence when she's out of sight. Is she the ghost, then?) However, we learn that the worldly-wise artist Theodora lives, in a tempestuous relationship, with a "friend" whose sex Jackson hides by contriving to avoid pronouns. That wholly gratuitous tease, together with Theo's behavior toward Eleanor, does hint at a sexual subtext. Robert Wise's excellent film adaptation, The Haunting (1963), gradually makes Theo's sexuality understood without ever quite naming it, even in Eleanor's outburst about "nature's mistakes" (which is not in the novel). Meanwhile, the deeply middle-aged, rather silly Dr. Montague of the novel becomes the younger, superficially masterful Dr. Markway, thereby setting up a triangle as thin but tensile as a spiderweb. Theo notices Eleanor's interest in Markway and reacts with veiled cuts. Markway seems to notice nothing, though his little gallantries may veil manipulative intent. Eleanor notices everything — if the account of her consciousness is to be believed — and suffers. Young-buck Luke, not finding his type among present company, stands back and functions as an ironic commentator. There is no "sex" whatever in this film; and yet the web vibrates.
Jackson's last completed novel, the acclaimed We Have Always Lived in the Castle, contains no supernatural elements. Instead, it contains a dormant murder mystery. The main characters, two sisters aged eighteen and twenty-eight, live with their invalid uncle in the ancestral mansion, having lost their parents and two other members of the family to arsenic poisoning some years before. The truth about that fatal dinner remains unpursued since a trial that ended in acquittal; nor will it be pursued here.
Our narrator is the younger sister, Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood. After introducing herself to us, she relates a distasteful part of her life's routine: a foray into the nearby village for food and library books. The villagers exhibit hostility to the Blackwoods in varying degrees; their only friends live at some distance and seldom come calling. When Merricat has finished running her errands along a course planned to minimize encounters, she beats a retreat to the family property through a small gate that opens into a wild, overgrown wood. Be it ever so dark, it's a welcoming world to her. Now she can happily walk the rest of the way to meet her sister Constance in the garden and proceed to the most welcoming world of all: the kitchen.
"We'll have muffins," Constance said, almost singing because she was sorting and putting away the food. "Uncle Julian will have an egg, done soft and buttery, and a muffin and a little pudding."
...
"I'm always so happy when you come home from the village," Constance said; she stopped to look and smile at me. "Partly because you bring home food, of course. But partly because I miss you."
Constance stops to look and smile at Merricat many times in the course of the story. Is it just one of the rhythms of an uneasy fairy tale? If our narrator finds her sister's smile suggestive of anything, she never lets on.
Mary Katherine Blackwood is a strange guide to follow through a fictional world. Though fourteen years younger than Eleanor Vance, at eighteen she could chance to be the more mature of the two. In fact, she's profoundly infantile. Eleanor is a socially passable adult harboring a psychochild; Merricat is altogether a child. When she zigzags through the village on her errands, she comprehends it as a game in which she loses two turns here, takes an extra turn there, and so on; all the while thinking baleful thoughts about the villagers. It's not a whimsy, but a ritual. Off the path that runs through the wild wood, she's made a hiding place in a bower so dense it keeps the rain out. She retreats there in times of distress to lie on a pallet and dwell in perfect security. This idea must be supremely appealing to the child in every reader; but in order for the author to say all she has to say to us as one grown-up to another, she must sometimes let her narrator observe things with a grown-up's informed intellect and describe them with a grown-up's — nay, with Shirley Jackson's — command of language.
Constance was perfectly composed. She rose and smiled and said she was glad to see them. Because Helen Clarke was ungraceful by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; before Constance had quite finished speaking Helen Clarke jostled Mrs. Wright and sent Mrs. Wright sideways like a careening croquet ball off into the far corner of the room where she sat abruptly and clearly without intention upon a small and uncomfortable chair.
In The Haunting of Hill House, we had an authorial narrator who could assume the guise of a mentally compromised character. Here, we have a mentally compromised narrator who can assume the guise of the author. These are tricks done with veils, and thank goodness for them. Through the dark terrain of We Have Always Lived in the Castle runs a babbling brook of gallows humor personified by the courtly Uncle Julian, who is extremely well-spoken and as mad as a hatter. That lethal dinner may have killed the majority of his putative loved ones and ruined his own health, but it was the making of him as a raconteur. His pleasantries over tea with Mrs. Wright, a meek but morbidly voracious listener, are too good in context to be excerpted.
Get the book and have a happy Halloween.
