The Haunting(s) of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson as compared to The Haunting (1963 movie based on Shirley Jackson’s book)
The Gothic Lit Collection
The Haunting does an excellent job capturing some of the feel of The Haunting of Hill House. While remaining a traditional narrative, however, the movie can never fully convey the ambiguity of the events and people at the Hill House of the book. Further, the movie, while frightening, cannot touch on the psychological horror that the book induces in the reader, in large part because the book not only conveys, but displays, the unhinging of Eleanor’s mind.
Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House is built around ambiguity while somehow remaining a story the reader can follow. The point of view begins with a distant narrator, but the narrator gradually becomes immersed in Eleanor’s mind and madness. This is part of the ambiguity: is everything as reported, and are all motives as assumed? Then there is the question of the narrator’s identity. Eleanor? Hill House? Theo, who is so empathic she may often guess at Eleanor’s thoughts? Whatever the answer is, the novel does not give us the comfort of knowing whether characters act as described, let alone think as ascribed. High emotion, however, is unambiguous. Even if the narrator is unreliable, they would have to mislead the reader with perfect consistency for the unsettling emotional intensity from all directions to be anything but fact.
While an atmosphere of fraught, unbalanced drama is certain, The Haunting of Hill House is a novel in which we can be sure of few other details and no single interpretation. To preserve narrative linearity, the makers of The Haunting pick one interpretation of each element among many potential reads from the book when they show action, characterization, event, and motivation. The movie does, however, nod toward ambiguity when each of Hill House’s visitors has a different explanation of how and why Eleanor crashes the car.
Still, much is overt in The Haunting, including Theo’s identity as a lesbian, as well as Eleanor’s innate goodness, her mother’s cruelty, and her sister’s callousness. As such, while the movie did well in showing one possible interpretation of the novel, it could not touch on the overwhelming confusion, suspicion, and near-paranoia that infused the book. When I found I couldn’t trust the narrator in The Haunting of Hill House, it was like realizing I couldn’t trust the directive thoughts in my own head, much as Eleanor could not.
This is one way the book does a better job of expressing the fractures in Eleanor’s mind. A narrative with this layered symbolism for insanity can be suggested on screen, but not experienced as it is through The Haunting of Hill House. The question surrounding the degree of reality in Eleanor’s perception is only the first suggestion of an unwell mind. That suggestion continues when, as the reader picks out the book’s patterns of symbolism and meaning, they dissolve, making the reader question their perception as they question Eleanor’s. The theme moves forward further when Eleanor’s and the reader’s paranoid suspicion toward each character burgeons through the book as individual cruelties are highlighted. The characters in The Haunting are not as cruel as those in The Haunting of Hill House, and we do not hear Eleanor’s internal voice wondering what they think of her quite so consistently.
Nearly every choice that soothes audience sensibility in The Haunting could be a necessity based on the medium in which the story is told. Nearly. When the movie fits Eleanor in the role of a romantic heterosexual female lead, this audience-soothing, traditional-movie-narrative choice goes directly against the book. In this, at least, Jackson’s novel is unambiguous. The Haunting of Hill House is not about romantic male-female relationships. The book rejects sexuality and sexualization to the point that it remarks upon itself. Eleanor spends an hour talking with Luke in the summerhouse, and is bored and internally derisive at this faint brush with courtship. When Theo paints Eleanor’s toenails, she comes undone at this sign of sexualization and maturity. I don’t suggest that Eleanor’s aversion to romance or sexuality is a sign of mental illness. Rather, the book refuses to let readers settle into anything comfortable by depriving them of common tropes. The Haunting of Hill House throws the reader off balance, just as Hill House does with Eleanor.
The Haunting shows a story in which a woman could be haunted, unstable to the point of insanity, or both. The Haunting of Hill House immerses the reader in a simulation of insanity. Through the book, the reader is unsure what is real, or what anything means, but they are quite sure that everything, down to the angles, is wrong and means something. The movie examines madness. The book makes us feel it.
