Around a week ago I was looking for some spooky reads in a bookshop and impulse bought The Haunting of Hill House pretty much as soon as I saw it. I hadn’t ever heard of Shirley Jackson and I didn’t know anything about the Netflix series either – in fact, when the bookseller told me a series had been inspired by the book, I was worried it was not going to be what I’d hoped.
Instead, I enjoyed it very much. Jackson’s writing was very clever, she managed to establish a sense of unrest in a relatively short time and I vividly remember a couple of scenes that completely tricked me into fear. The book did however surprise me in a few ways: one of the things I found most interesting was how the protagonist’s mental state, mainly her paranoia towards the other occupants, was portrayed. And that’s what this post is about. I wanna say in advance that I read the book in translation, and as usual with translation you’re never 100% sure what was the writer’s intention when it comes to subtler things. Also, there are going to be spoilers from now on.
As all of us who have read the book know, the events taking place in Hill House combined with Eleanor’s sensitive and untrusting character result in her essentially going mad. She grows more and more paranoic, her relationship with the others deteriorates (mainly with Theodora, who’s a much more spontaneous and confident person than her) and her behaviour and thoughts get weirder until >!she eventually kills herself in the same way that was mentioned at the start of the book!<. Despite the book being narrated in the third person by an (at least supposedly) omniscient narrator, what actually ends up happening is that the story follows what’s going on in Eleanor’s mind so closely that I couldn’t help but feel like all we’re being told, especially as the book progresses, is purely her own perception of reality.
If we were to treat the narration as objective, then the problem wouldn’t just be Eleanor’s paranoia. The other occupants are at times openly rude to her, in an unnatural way even, and tell her exactly what she thinks they’d like to tell her: that she’s a drama queen, that she’s just seeking attention. Theodora multiple times implies that Eleanor wrote her name on the walls herself and goes around knocking on doors (which she interestingly ends up doing near the end) just to scare the others. Sometimes the conversations evolve in a way where it’s difficult to tell what the occupants’ intentions are behind their words, even the pacing of the dialogue seems somewhat off, and often those conversations are about Eleanor, with her present yet not interacting. The scene where Eleanor, Theodora and Luke go outside near the river, Eleanor turns around and doesn’t see them, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that she’s been abandoned and goes searching for them is entirely narrated from her point of view: the reader follows her train of thought and is as surprised as her when she finds out that she’s alone. The fact that towards the end she goes spying on the other occupants to hear what they’re saying about her behind her back is very telling of her obsession too.
Since things get weirder as Eleanor’s mental state worsens and the book approaches the end, I like to think that what we’re being told is Eleanor having a perception of reality so influenced by her fear and paranoia that she completely misinterprets what’s being said, even to the point of hallucination. Maybe all those weird dialogues weren’t actually phrased so harshly, she just exaggerated it, and as time passed the other characters would get more upset with her rude or bizarre responses and behaviours, which she felt happening, fueling her paranoia in a vicious circle.
Sorry for the rambling but I needed to type this out somewhere. As I mentioned at the start I was just looking for a spooky, gothic read for Halloween but this book being so psychological caught me unprepared and I’ll definitely still be thinking about it for a bit.
by StrictlyShadowy