Mrs. Dudley in The Haunting of Hill House

      In The Haunting of Hill House, Mrs. Dudley, the house's caretaker, is introduced with a sinister tone. In her first appearance, she says nothing, and stands silently aside to let Eleanor into the house. Mrs. Dudley's first spoken line is a statement, proclaiming Eleanor's room to be “the blue room” (27). Her next set of dialogue is a listing of what she does and at what times.

I set dinner on the dining-room sideboard at six sharp,” she said. “You can serve yourselves. I clear up in the morning. I have breakfast ready for you at nine. That's the way I agreed to do. I can't keep the rooms up the way you;d like, but there's no one else you could get that would help me. I don't wait on people. What I agreed to, it doesn't mean I wait on people (27).

     By examining these lines on a sentence level, we find that there is a definite choppiness to the bulk of the dialogue. Mrs. Dudley uses short, very brief sentences that cut up the ideas of the lines into chunks, and she rattles off these chunks one after another. Later on in the story, she also reuses these lines, feeding them back to the Hill House visitors one by one. Her words are canned lines. When spoken to, she frequently responds with one of her cookie-cutter statements, or doesn't respond at all. This gives her character a sort of robot-like feel, as though she serves no purpose besides fulfilling the duties of a housekeeper. She has no opinions and doesn't seem to have any likes or dislikes. The only hint of personality we get is when Mrs. Dudley converses with Mrs. Montague on the matter of Theodora and Luke being under the same roof, with Mrs. Dudley's voice “comfortable and easy” (164).

      There's a number of ways that we could look at this. If we wish to, we could see it from an overarching, artistic movement perspective. As I recall, Professor Potts mentioned that Gothic literature stemmed from Romanticism ideals, which in turn, were a response to Neoclassicism, with Neoclassicism emphasizing ideals such as order, logic, and reasoning. Order implies routine, which leads to rigidity. Mrs. Dudley's precise, rigidly routine behavior thus suggests the sinister inhumanity of surrendering the self to a public function.

      Another way of looking at Mrs. Dudley's behavior is from the way it pertains to the Cult of Domesticity. A woman's function under the Cult of Domesticity is to surrender her own desires and wishes and instead, maintain and care for the house and family, while remaining submissive. With this in mind, we see that Mrs. Dudley, as housekeeper, is sole caretaker of the house. She prepares the meals and cleans up, and says nothing except to list her services and the times that they take place. In her only moment of disagreement, her voice remains “comfortable and easy” (164).