Day 8

“What happens when you go back to a real house?” Eleanor asks Dr. Montague after his long explanation of how all the angles in Hill House are slightly off. Then she tries to clarify: “I mean—a—well—a real house?” Why doesn’t Eleanor want to recognize that Hill House is real? Think of that first sentence again. Is Eleanor the organism who can’t exist under conditions of absolute reality? “I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways,” Dr. Montague remarks. Moments later, the house literally knocks Eleanor sideways.

The domestic issues are so important to Jackson: interior decoration (not just the enormous statue, but all her attention to the finer details of wallpaper, upholstery, curtains) but most of all food. Elsewhere in her work—her early story “Like Mother Used to Make,” for instance—being a good cook is a sign of trustworthiness; being a bad cook, conversely, is a sign that something’s off with a person. Here, that too is turned on its head. Anyone who’s ever tried to make a soufflé knows that it’s not a forgiving dish: the eggs have to be beaten just right and then the whole thing has to be baked at the right temperature, in the right kind of dish, for the right amount of time. In fact, cooks often use the word “magic” in reference to making a soufflé. There’s even a popular idea that you can’t jump in the kitchen or otherwise rattle things while a soufflé is baking, or it might fall. (I have no idea if this is true—I’ve never made a soufflé, although as a child, I used to watch my stepmother do it.) And yet—as Theodora marvels—Mrs. Dudley produces what seems to be a fine soufflé in the kitchen at Hill House. Is this a sign that she, too, is in tune with the house in some ineffable way? At any rate, the place seems to have a well-equipped kitchen.

“What about your own kitchen? In your little apartment?” Theodora asks Eleanor “absently.” (Yes, Jackson’s style gives the lie to those who would have us rid our writing of all adverbs, doesn’t it? She goes for just the right ones, in just the right places.) We know that she knows Eleanor has lied to her. And it’s obviously a bad idea to lie to a clairvoyant. What will Theodora do with this information?