The Haunting Of Hill House

Hill House, with its Gothic darkness, gloom, and former grandeur, takes on many meanings and represents the characters’ fears, desires, and destinies. From the start, it is hard to reach, made nearly inaccessible by a long treacherous road, guarded by heavy gates, and protected by the abrasive Mr. Dudley. Eleanor, upon seeing it, finds it “vile” and “diseased” (23) and feels compelled to flee. Hill House is described as having human qualities—it has “evil” in its “face,” and it seems alive and watchful. As she steps onto the veranda, the house comes “around her in a rush” (25); once inside the house, she is swallowed by its darkness, feeling as if she is inside a “monster” that can feel her “tiny movement inside” (29).

The house is difficult to navigate. Characters have trouble finding their way among the maze of windowless rooms and hallways. Doors they leave open mysteriously shut. The house’s ominous characteristics are in part the result of the fact that Hugh Crain, the original owner, designed the house so that “every angle is slightly wrong” (77). This distortion tricks the mind, confusing the guests as to where in the house they are located and what should be around every corner. The house distorts balance, eschewing “familiar stable patterns” (78).

Hill House is often described as being like a stifling mother, and events in the house suggest Eleanor’s own recently deceased mother is somehow manifesting in the house. Luke says the house is “motherly” in that “[e]verything is so soft” and “so padded,” and the “[g]reat embracing chairs and sofas […] turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down” (154). When Theodora and Eleanor hear banging outside their bedrooms, Eleanor, upon first waking, believes it is her mother banging for help. She does not want to enter the library, citing her mother. At the end of the novel, Eleanor calls for her mother outside the library, then follows a voice upstairs, looking for her. Even the writing in the hallway and Theodora’s room—“HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (107)—suggests Eleanor will never escape her mother’s control. Eleanor’s possession at the end of the novel reiterates that escape from the house—and from her mother—is impossible. In the final scene, insisting “[t]he house wants me to stay” (178), Eleanor crashes her car into a tree; her final thought—“Why am I doing this?” (182)—invites readers to wonder if Eleanor had control over her actions or whether she was compelled by the house to kill herself, returning “home.” Her journey comes full circle, as if the house had indeed been “waiting” for her, “biding its time” (112).

The house’s eventually swallowing of Eleanor is consistent with its dreary history. Three of Hugh Crain’s wives died while he lived there, and after his death, his daughters fought bitterly over the house. Later, his older daughter’s companion hung herself from the turret. Although the house is frequently equated with an overbearing mother, it is also characterized by Hugh Crain’s dark masculine presence, whose self-aggrandizing statue still sits in the drawing room. The eternal presence of the statue, “[a] symbol of the protection of the house” (79), suggests that the force that smothered the Crain women still remains.

The first paragraph of the novel states that “[n]o live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” (1). Both the first and final paragraphs of the novel note that Hill House is “not sane.” It can therefore be argued that Hill House represents absolute reality, the absence of fantasy and dreams. It is reality, then, to which Eleanor succumbs. At one point, Eleanor playfully suggests to Dr. Montague that she is imagining him, Luke, and Theodora and that “none of this is real” (103); Dr. Montague responds that if she believes that, he will send her away, for she “would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace” (103). Eleanor, a dreamer with an especially vivid imagination, is uniquely incapable of accepting the reality that she will never break free of the trauma of her life. Hill House, says Dr. Montague, with its lack of balance and confused corridors, was built by Hugh Crain “to suit his mind” (77). Hill House represents not only the twisted mind of Hugh Crain but also the unfathomable depths within Eleanor.