Day 18

This whole chapter! The slow reading helps me see even more what a tour de force it is. We’ll unpack it today and tomorrow.

In a lecture called “Garlic in Fiction,” given at a writers’ conference shortly after completing Hill House, Jackson argued that keeping the reader’s attention is the writer’s greatest challenge. No story is interesting, she wrote, “unless the writer, using all his skill and craft, sets out deliberately to make it so.” But images and symbols, if used too frequently, will overpower a story, just as garlic will overpower a dish; they must be used only as accents. She explains that for each character in a story or novel, she uses one central image or set of images that the reader will come to associate with that character. For Eleanor, there are five: the little old lady she meets on the way to the car, the stone lions, the oleander bushes, the cottage with the white cat, and the cup of stars. The five symbols recur throughout the novel, and each time they do, Jackson explains, they remind the reader of Eleanor’s loneliness and homelessness. They become “artificially loaded words” that, deployed correctly, have a powerful impact.

What do you think of this technique? Does it work, or does it feel repetitious to you?

“Hill House went dancing,” Theodora said in Chapter 7. Now Eleanor dances with the house, becoming a child of the house, hearing her mother—a different, loving mother—call her. It’s she, now, who creates the “psychic” manifestations, knocking on the doors and rattling them. But this can’t be the explanation for what happened earlier. What do you think, at this point? Are we dealing with a house with supernatural powers that gets its grips into Eleanor and takes over her mind, or an unstable, lonely woman who somehow makes her own fears manifest in the house? (Mrs. Dudley, as we see, may also have some kind of psychic connection to the house.)

Notice how dramatically Eleanor’s perspective on the house has altered. It’s no longer vile and diseased; it’s “lucky,” “gathered comfortably into the hills… protected and warm.” The cold spot vanishes, the stone floor caresses her; she is home.

I notice also what seems to be Theodora’s real fear for Eleanor’s safety. Perhaps she does have feelings for Eleanor, and her manipulativeness was all in Eleanor’s mind?