The Haunting of Hill House

Upon reading the final half of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, much emphasis was placed in classroom discussion upon the role of family (blood-related or otherwise) as demonstrative of the importance of lineage in the Gothic genre. What was missing from our conversation was what I felt to be a prominent, if tongue-in-cheek criticism of the “cult of domesticity” expressed throughout the course of the novel. The central figure of the novel (aside from Hill House itself), Eleanor, is the embodiment of the submissive, pious domestic shut-in idealized by 19^th century United States and British culture.  Her youth is spent nursing her chronically ill mother in the family home with a sense of “duty and conscience [belonging] properly to Girl Scouts (5)” and any notion of independent action – even driving a car or meeting a male stranger unaccompanied – is reprimanded by her sister and brother-in-law is ill-befitting a young, unmarried woman. Aside from the continuous mention of the cost of the car, note that the strongest argument against Eleanor’s use of it is the possibility of disservice to the family – “Suppose we needed a car to get her (Eleanor’s niece) to a doctor? ...Suppose we couldn't get a doctor and needed to go to a hospital (6)?” Even when she makes her first autonomous decision to leave home and meet Dr. Montague, Eleanor merely trades one domestic prison for another in committing to life at Hill House.  In perhaps the ultimate gesture of black humor, it is the house/domestic sphere, despite all the happiness it seems to bring Eleanor, that is her undoing – upon being coerced to leave Hill House, Eleanor crashes her car into a tree and (presumably) dies. You want to leave the Cult? The only way out is the ultimate way out.

In a similarly facetious vein, Mrs. Dudley functions as a more humorous caricature of the same feminine idealization. We find her funny because all she seems capable of is a constant, lifeless repetition of cooking, cleaning, and parroting her rigid schedule of duties. We laugh, and are meant to laugh, because the “definitive incarnation of woman” that the COD prompts is more ludicrous and “inhuman” than the phenomena labeled “supernatural” occurring within the house. It is Jackson’s way of saying “truth really is stranger/more frightening than fiction.”