Day 14

Just when things start to get really intense, Jackson throws us some comic relief in the form of Mrs. Montague and Arthur. You’d think a ghost hunter and a medium would make a good match, but these two don’t have a very happy or warm marriage. Mrs. Montague has her own ideas about how to investigate Hill House and couldn’t be less interested in her husband’s—she won’t even let him finish a sentence. We find Jackson’s comic touch in Mrs. Montague’s dialogue—all those italicized words demonstrating her haughty, smug tone—and, more understatedly, in the others’ baffled reactions to her.

And the adverbs! They pull a lot of weight here, as elsewhere. Dr. Montague: obediently, hopefully, hesitantly, soothingly, wearily. Luke’s rhyme: primly and grimly. Mrs. Montague: irritably (twice), daintily, speculatively. Perhaps the best: “Don’t let me interrupt your dinner,” Mrs. Montague says finally.

My mind keeps returning to the first paragraph of this chapter, which feels at first like a throwaway, but contains some of Jackson’s most uncanny writing: the trees and flowers “interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying” to pay attention to Eleanor, the daisy that dies in her fingers, her look “into its dead face.” So much death in the space of a few sentences, yet Eleanor can think only of her own “overwhelming wild happiness.” The final question—repeated—both gives her agency and takes it away. Does she have control over what she will do? Did she ever?