Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is a quintessential novel in the horror genre. Yet, understanding the inner workings of her haunted house story is important, as it is firmly rooted in gothic horror. It’s also a novel about atmosphere and what lies under the surface. More so, it is all about the slow burn. By analyzing this text, we can understand more about the genre itself and what true horror looks like.
Synopsis of The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House has a great premise. A group of four disparate individuals gather at a haunted house to investigate paranormal activities. It is a very straightforward novel in the realm of horror. Even so, house itself is steeped in a history of violence. This makes the investigators’ exploration and examinations more intriguing.
Of course, the haunt begins soon enough. The characters are all plagued by their own experiences with noises and strange apparitions roaming throughout the house. The story soon descends upon one of the protagonists, Eleanor, and the plot moves quickly at that point. There are seances, spirit writing, hallucinations, outbursts, and other dramatic moments that pushes the action into bizarre places.
The Haunting of Hill House Analysis
This is an excellent gothic horror/thriller that surpasses even some of the older, more distinguished novels in the same genre. This is because Jackson uses a psychological approach to telling the story. It is also because the novel lives in a scenario most of us are familiar with through pop culture. Paranormal investigators travel to a haunted house and investigate strange occurrences. We have certainly seen that in television and in movies. What we are more unfamiliar with is the extant trauma and psychology of the investigators. In this way, Jackson paints these characters expertly.
Modernity and Family
Likewise, it is the modernity of The Haunting of Hill House that makes it so relevant and scary. The novel speaks volumes of our culture and of ourselves. Richard Pascal, author of “Walking Alone Together: Family Monsters in ‘The Haunting of Hill House’,” writes that familial arcs arise in the novel, whether through the characters’ interactions or through their backstories.
“The most famous of Jackson’s novels, The Haunting of Hill House, conjured up postwar America’s disturbing anxieties about the modern family with wit, acuteness, and a healthy modicum of dread,” he writes. “In Hill House, the opening paragraph solemnly announces, ‘whatever walks there, walks alone’” (Pascal).
The modernity of this story stands in contrast to the gothic elements present. It is a slow read, but each moment adds up to something grander. The setting is desolate, spooky, unpredictable. And the most important point, there is sin there in the walls of the house: suicide and past trauma. There, the ghosts haunting the house are very real–at least through history.
What We Don’t Know
Jackson’s book has a lot in common with Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. James spends much of the novel convincing the reader of the hauntings. But, are they truly hauntings? Meanwhile, in Jackson’s book, she seems to tell us that these hauntings are very real. However, they are unlike the ones we are often familiar with. A ghost at the top of the stairs, or something grabbing your foot from under the bed at night.
The first line of the book seems to hint at this realization: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality …” Outright, the reader doesn’t understand this line in its full context, but they will come to understand it eventually. As in writing good ghost stories, the characterization is what works here in the novel. There are ghosts in the attic, and there are ghosts in our heads.
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro once said, “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.” In other words, for the characters in Jackson’s novel, they learn about themselves through the haunting. They also learn too much about each other.
Shirley Jackson in Her Own Words
Jackson has spoken about the inspiration of this novel in detail. Unsurprisingly, the story sprang up after seeing a specifically dark house while on vacation. Here is an excerpt from Shirley Jackson’s essay “Experience and Fiction.” In it, she discusses The Haunting of Hill House and the house that drove her to write the book.
Reading Psychic Literature
“I was [working] on a novel about a haunted house because I happened by chance, to read a book about a group of people, nineteenth-century psychic researchers, who rented a haunted house and recorded their impressions of the things they saw and heard and felt in order to contribute a learned paper to the Society for Psychic Research. They thought that they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivation and background.
“I found it so exciting that I wanted more than anything else to set up my own haunted house, and put my own people in it, and see what I could make happen. As so often happens, the minute I started thinking about ghosts and haunted houses, all kinds of things turned up to enforce my intentions, or perhaps I was thinking so entirely about my new book that everything I saw turned to it; I can’t say, although I can say that I could do with some of the manifestation I have met.
The House of Nightmares
“The first thing that happened was in New York City; we–my husband and I –were on the train which stops briefly at the 125th Street station, and just outside the station, dim and horrible in the dusk, I saw a building so disagreeable that I could not stop looking at it; it was tall and black and as I looked at it when the train began to move again it faded away and disappeared.
“That night in our hotel room I woke up with nightmares, the kind where you have to get up and turn on the light and walk around for a few minutes just to make sure that there is a real world and this one is it, not the one you have been dreaming about; my nightmares had somehow settled around the building I had seen from the train. From that time on I completely ruined my whole vacation in New York City by dreading the moment when we would have to take the train back and pass that building again.
“Let me just point out right here and now that my unconscious mind has been unconscious for a number of years now and it is my firm intention to keep it that way. When I have nightmares about a horrid building, it is the horrid building I am having nightmares about, and no one is going to talk me out of it; that is final.”
Conclusion
The horror of Jackson’s novel comes from our own psychosis. It is the pain we feel from lack of love, and the phantom is in our own selves. It is the haunting we feel everyday when love does not return affection and when we are pushed out of our rightful place. In the end, it is almost as if Jackson is telling us something very important: we have been the ghosts the whole time.
Works Cited
Pascal, Richard. “Walking Alone Together: Family Monsters in ‘The Haunting of Hill House.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 46, no. 4, 2014, pp. 464–485. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43151007. Accessed 23 Oct. 2020.
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