The Haunting Of Hill House

Now that the house has infiltrated Eleanor’s identity, she is not only aware of movements and sounds within the house but also takes on the role of the haunting. Eleanor bangs on the doors of the upstairs hallway, mimicking the mysterious banging she has listened to with the other guests. Hiding downstairs as they look for her, she laughs to herself that they are “so slow, and so deaf and so heavy” (170)—in other words, so human, unlike supernatural forces, with which she now identifies. Eleanor is resistant to Dr. Montague’s order that she leave, believing “[t]he house wants me to stay” (178). As she drives away, she thinks how “[t]hey can’t turn me out” (181) because Hill House is hers.

Despite her yearning for a life of her own, Eleanor finds in Hill House not a new life of freedom but a return to the very oppression she went to Hill House to escape. Tellingly, the spirit named Nell who speaks with Mrs. Montague through her planchette says she is waiting for “Mother” (142). On her last night in the house, Eleanor bangs on the walls and doors in the upstairs hallway, mimicking the events of the second night at Hill House when Eleanor thought her mother was banging for her medicine. In this final chapter, Eleanor stands before the library asking for Mother, stating, “You’re here somewhere” (168). In entering the room she’d felt was forbidden by her mother and climbing up the turret like the Crain companion who’d hung herself, Eleanor thus becomes the haunting, further enmeshing her identity with the house. It also further suggests her mother’s continued power over her, even in her death. (Eleanor’s eerie suggestion that she actually is responsible for her mother’s death—she tells Luke and Theodora that she wondered if she woke up to hear her mother calling for her medicine and “just went back to sleep” (156)—is further evidence of her desperate desire to escape her.) In this light, Luke’s earlier comments that everything in this house is “all so motherly” (154) and that it is “[a] mother house” (156) seem prophetic.

Eleanor has frequently repeated the song lyric, “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” The conclusion of the novel, in which Eleanor finds not loving companionship but her mother, suggests the possibilities she hopes for—those she sees in her imaginary cup of stars—are never meant to be. Instead, she returns to where she began, trapped, with no escape, in her past of loneliness and abuse. Readers may recall the first line of the novel, which stated that “[n]o live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” (1). It is arguably the reality of her inability to escape her loneliness—of her not belonging anywhere, of not having anything her own—that vanquishes Eleanor in the end.

Eleanor’s crashing into a tree, killing herself, is her last and desperate attempt to free herself by taking control. Pressing the accelerator, she thinks, “I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself” (182). In Chapter 1, Eleanor left for Hill House thinking, “I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step” (10): Her going to Hill House, in the car that “belonged entirely to her” (10), represents her making something her own after years of serving her mother. Similarly, her final act represents an effort to be her own person after being “swallowed whole” (29) by a “mother house” (156). Like Eleanor, the final paragraph of the novel comes full circle, repeating the opening lines: “Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within” (182).

At the conclusion of the novel, readers may find that many questions are left unanswered. Did Eleanor—who was invited to Hill House because of her childhood connection to poltergeists—somehow create the events at Hill House? Is she, more than the others, uniquely susceptible to Hill House’s evil? Did Hill House target Eleanor, determined, for some reason, to take her? That we can only speculate makes Hill House as mysterious to us as it is to its guests. That Dr. Montague’s paper receives “contemptuous reception” (182) suggests Hill House continues to be quantified or known. It is also one more way in which characters come full circle, in which dreams are impossible and striving is futile.