Danse Macabre (46 page)

American gothic, where we have, instead of a symbolic womb, a symbolic mirror. This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside out—what scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't like—our own.

While looking at
The House Next Door
, we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost aside—there are no ghosts
per se
in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism: the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost always—knowingly or unknowingly—mimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the Ever-Popular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of
The Incredible Hulk
as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's
Curse of the Werewolf
, the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change. The real
problem
with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor. The real
secret
of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for werewolves.

"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House
; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition.

"The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . . as she was reading a book about a group of nineteenth-century psychic researchers who rented a haunted house in order to study it and record their impressions of what they had seen and heard for the purpose of presenting a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. As she recalls: 'They thought 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 motivations and backgrounds.' The story so excited her that she could hardly wait to create her own haunted house and her own people to study it.

"Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque house—one so evil-looking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure . . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably hauntedlooking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very much like the hideous building she had seen in New York: `. . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's great-grandfather had built it." *

Heh-heh-heh, as the Old Witch used to say.

On its simplest level,
Hill House
follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read: it is a tale of four ghost-busters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghost-busters—Eleanor, Theo, and Luke—have come together under the auspices of one Dr. Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wise-guy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first.

Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons. Montague has combed the back files of several psychic societies, and has sent invitations to a fairly large number of people who have been involved with

*From
Shirley Jackson
, by Lenemaja Friedman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 121. Ms. Friedman quotes directly from Shirley Jackson's account of how the book came to be; Miss Jackson's account was published in an article entitled "Experience and Fiction."

"abnormal" events in the past—the invitations, of course, suggest that these "special" people might enjoy summering with Montague at Hill House. Eleanor and Theo are the only two to respond, each for her own reasons. Theo, who has demonstrated a fairly convincing ability with the Rhine cards, is on the outs with her current lover (in the film, Theo—played by Claire Bloom—is presented as a lesbian with a letch for Eleanor; in Jackson's novel there is the barest whiff that Theo's sexual preferences may not be 100 percent AC). But it is Eleanor, on whose house stones fell when she was a little girl, that the novel is vitally concerned with, and it is the character of Eleanor and Shirley Jackson's depiction of it that elevates
The Haunting of Hill House
into the ranks of the great supernatural novels—indeed, it seems to me that it and James's
The Turn of the Screw
are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years (although we might add two long novellas: Machen's "The Great God Pan" and Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness").

"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic. . . weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality."

Try this shoe on Eleanor, and we find it fits perfectly. She is obsessively concerned with herself, and in Hill House she finds a huge and monstrous mirror reflecting back her own distorted face. She is a woman who has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and her family life. When we are inside her mind (which is almost constantly, with the exception of the first chapter and the last), we may find ourselves thinking of that old Oriental custom of foot binding—only it is not Eleanor's feet that have been bound; it is that part of her mind where the ability to live any sort of independent life must begin.

"It is true that Eleanor's characterization is one of the finest in Miss Jackson's works," Lenemaja Friedman writes. "It is second only to that of Merricat in the later novel
We Have
Always Lived in the Castle
. There are many facets to Eleanor's personality: she can be gay, charming, and witty when she feels wanted; she is generous and willing to give of herself. At the same time, she resents Theo's selfishness and is ready to accuse Theo of trickery when they discover the sign on the wall. For many years, Eleanor has been filled with frustration and hate: she has come to hate her mother and then finally her sister and brother-in-law for taking advantage of her more submissive and passive nature. She struggles to overcome the guilt she feels for the death of her mother.

"Although one comes to know her quite well, she remains mysterious. The mystery is a product of Eleanor's uncertainty and her mental and emotional changes, which are difficult to fathom. She is insecure and, therefore, unstable in her relationships with others and her relationship to the house. She feels the irresistible force of the spirits and longs, finally, to submit to them. When she does decide not to leave Hill House, one must assume she is slipping into madness." *

Hill House, then, is the microcosm where universal forces collide, and in his piece on
The
Sundial
(published in 1958, a year before
The Haunting of Hill House
), John G. Park goes on to speak of "the voyage . . . {the} attempt to flee . . . an attempt to escape . . . cloying authoritarianism . . .

This is, in fact, the place where Eleanor's own voyage begins, and also the motive for that voyage. She is shy, withdrawn, and submissive. The mother has died, and Eleanor has judged and found herself guilty of negligence—perhaps even murder. She has remained firmly under the thumb of her married sister following her mother's death, and early on

*Friedman,
Shirley Jackson
, p. 133.

there's a bitter argument over whether Eleanor will be allowed to go to Hill House at all. And Eleanor, who is thirty-two, habitually claims to be two years older.

She does manage to get out, practically stealing the car which she has helped to purchase. The jailbreak is on, Eleanor's attempt to escape what Park calls "cloying authoritarianism." The journey will lead her to Hill House, and as Eleanor herself thinks—with a growing, feverish intensity as the story progresses—"journeys end in lovers meeting." Her narcissism is perhaps most strikingly established by a fantasy she indulges in while still on the way to Hill House. She stops the car, full of "disbelief and wonder" at the sight of a gate flanked by ruined stone pillars in the middle of a long line of oleanders. Eleanor recalls that oleanders are poisonous . . . and then:

Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken? I will go into a sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses trained over arbors, and find one path—jeweled, perhaps, with rubies and emeralds, soft enough for a king's daughter to walk upon with her little sandaled feet—and it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under a spell. I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return . . . And we shall live happily ever after.

The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasy-dream. Perhaps even the happilyever-after part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that. More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissism—weird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving force—movies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact. Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit.

In Eleanor's life, that turning-inward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk."

Eleanor immediately turns this into herself: "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same.

But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you. I said that
The House Next Door
forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghost-story fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points: Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time. His second wife died of a fall—cause unknown. His two little girls remained in Hill House until the death of Crain's third wife (nothing there-that wife died in Europe), and were then sent to a cousin. They spent the rest of their lives quarreling over ownership of the mansion. Later, the older sister returns to Hill House with a companion, a young girl from the village.