The Staying Power of “The Haunting of Hill House” and Shirley Jackson

From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959):

“I need not remind you, I think, that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden–perhaps sacred–is as old as the mind of man. Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.”

Thus speaks Dr. Montague to the people he’s invited to observe the paranormal goings-on at Hill House, in a book that’s been called by the Guardian “the definitive haunted house story.”

Longtime horror enthusiast that I am, I’d never read The Haunting of Hill House until this summer, nor watched any of the movie and TV adaptations (which, reportedly, are hit or miss). I had only read her creepy short story The Lottery (free to read), which I recommend. I enjoyed Hill House so much I’m rereading it before giving it back to the library. It’s a slow-burn Gothic horror that takes its time unnerving you.

I am the same age–48–that Shirley Jackson was when she died in 1965. Reading her Wikipedia page, I can’t help but identify with her, just as I identified with Eleanor, the awkward, imaginative protagonist of Hill House.

Like me, Jackson was a mother and approached this role with humor, saying of herself and her husband “Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance,” writing memoirs about her experiences of parenthood titled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. (Horror writers have the best senses of humor, but that’s a topic for another post.) In life, Jackson felt patronized in her role as a “faculty wife” and, even as an adult, endured her mother’s constant criticism about her hair, her weight, and her nonconformist life. Jackson’s work explored themes I’ve often visited in my own stories: madness; being haunted by one’s own past or failures; how women’s sublimated rage can emerge in violence. If we had met, I imagine we would have been friends.

Heart disease killed Jackson. In addition to physical issues (heavy smoking, asthma, colitis), Jackson dealt with severe anxiety and a chronically unfaithful husband whom she felt incapable of divorcing. She had taken drugs (tranquillizers and amphetamines) periodically for various conditions as well as drinking alcohol. And then there’s the toll that raising four children takes on a woman’s body and energy, perhaps unquantifiable, but deeply familiar to every mother.

What else might Jackson have written if she’d had more time? I find her early death as tragic as the protagonist’s fate at the end of The Haunting of Hill House. Ultimately they could not escape past events that damaged and haunted them.

Toward the end of her life, while recovering from a debilitating nervous breakdown, Jackson wrote in her journal:

if i am cured and well and oh glorious alive then my books should be different. who wants to write about anxiety from a place of safety? although i suppose i would never be entirely safe since i cannot completely reconstruct my mind. but what conflict is there to write about then? i keep thinking vaguely about husbands and wives, perhaps in suburbia, but i do not really think this is my kind of thing. perhaps a funny book. a happy book. . . . plots will come flooding when i get the rubbish cleared away from my mind.

There are three morals to this story. One: get your heart checked, especially if you’ve got risk factors. Two: read Shirley Jackson’s work if you haven’t already; I think you’ll like it. And three: if your heart’s desire is to write that story that’s in your soul, start right now, today, because none of us knows how long we’ve got, and no matter how dark your story might be, it’s worth telling.