Day 16

Eleanor awakens with a new feeling of oneness with the house: suddenly she can hear “everything, all over,” including Mrs. Montague and Arthur coming down the stairs before the others do. Their obliviousness no longer feels as comic to me now.

What do we make of the scene in which Eleanor tries to force herself into Theodora’s life and is summarily rejected? She doesn’t react emotionally, or really at all. And then the next, in which Eleanor imagines her future life with Theodora—“I could help her in her shop… We could go anywhere we pleased, to the edge of the world if we liked”—and finds instead “a call she had been listening for all her life,” an embrace by unseen arms that makes her feel at last loved and safe.

Eleanor’s revelation about her guilt over her mother is dropped in almost as an aside. If fear and guilt are indeed sisters, Eleanor’s fear is rooted in her guilt over her mother’s death. Eleanor reversed roles with her invalid mother, she the caretaker and her mother the dependent; in Hill House the roles reverse again, the hallways filled with ghostly children who pound on the doors and laugh at the keyhole but will never be allowed in. In the end, the house itself takes on a kind of maternal role: “housemother,” as Luke puns. The furniture is “padded,” yet “hard and unwelcoming”; it is “vile,” “diseased,” “unclean,” just as Eleanor’s mother was in her illness.

In a lecture titled “Experience and Fiction,” in which Jackson discusses the writing of Hill House, she writes that she sleepwalked one night and found on her desk the next morning a piece of paper on which she had scrawled “DEAD DEAD.” I could find no such paper among the drafts of the novel in her archive; instead, there was a page on which she had scribbled “FAMILY FAMILY.” In the world of the novel, are the two essentially the same?