The Real Horror in <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>
When Eleanor Vance first encounters the eponymous mansion in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, it seems to consume her before she even enters it. The house is “vile,” she thinks; “it is diseased.” It looms over her, “enormous and dark,” twisting her stomach and chilling the air around her. As Eleanor stands on the veranda of Hill House, it comes “around her in a rush,” enveloping her, swallowing her whole.
Hill House is less a home than a panic attack, a fog of anxiety and dread that disrupts Eleanor’s physiological state. But anxiety is nothing new to Eleanor, a shy 32-year-old woman who’s spent the past 11 years nursing her invalid mother. Eleanor finds it exceedingly difficult to talk to strangers, and her negative thoughts about herself pervade the book, which is told almost entirely from her perspective. “I am very foolish,” she frets in one moment. During a conversation, she thinks, “Why am I talking?” Later, she confesses, “I’m no good at talking to people and
