Read-along – Hill House (1 of 3)

Chapters 1, 2 & 3 – and Garlic in Fiction

We’ve survived one night in Hill House . . . How are your nerves? I’d love to hear what you think so far. Here are my thoughts:

I look forward to discussing Chapters 4 & 5 next week.

---

In the summer of 1959, after finishing the manuscript of The Haunting of Hill House, but before it was published, Shirley Jackson delivered a lecture entitled ‘Garlic in Fiction’. She opens with a brilliant line:

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer – any writer, beginning or otherwise – is the reader.

She talks about how hard it is to keep a reader reading your writing and explains that one technique is to create a pattern of charged images and symbols. These devices should be used sparingly, however – like garlic in cooking – otherwise they can overpower the dish.

As a demonstration, she uses an example from Hill House:

My problem was to take Eleanor, a woman of thirty-two, from her home in New York City to a haunted house two hundred miles away. In the course of this journey, which begins the book, she was to be built up as a wholly sympathetic character, the main character in the book; she was to be shown as infinitely lonely and unhappy. At the same time, there had to be a transition for the reader, from the sensible environment of the city to the somewhat less believable atmosphere of the haunted house, and the preparation had to be made carefully, in Eleanor’s mind and the reader’s, for the introduction of the horrors to come later, and Eleanor’s reactions. The reader had to be persuaded to identify sufficiently with Eleanor so that when later he encounters with her the various manifestations in the haunted house he will be willing to suspend disbelief and go along with Eleanor, because she has become thoroughly believable. This was hard.

She explains how she assigned five images to Eleanor over the course of her car journey: the little old lady, who says she will pray for her; the two stone lions outside a house she passes; the oleander bushes; the white cat on a step of a cottage; and the little girl’s ‘cup of stars’.

Julie Harris as Eleanor ‘Lance’ in The Haunting (1963), dir. Robert Wise

The basic emphasis in the entire journey has been Eleanor’s longing for a home, for a place of her own, and of course for a real cup of stars to break the spell of dullness and loneliness that she has always known. . . . Each of these cumulative symbols dovetails with the others, each belongs absolutely to the journey between reality and unreality, and each must carry the weight of Eleanor’s loneliness and longing for a place where she belongs.

Jackson goes on to explain that the careful patterning of these five images across the novel will eventually lead Eleanor (and the reader) from an unhappy reality ‘to a very happy, very dangerous, unreal life’ – but more of that in due course . . .

You can read the full text of ‘Garlic in Fiction’ on the New Yorker website.

---

If you’re not planning to read The Haunting of Hill House, you can choose to opt out of our Shirley Jackson conversation. Just follow this link to your settings and, under Notifications, slide the toggle next to ‘The Haunting of Hill House’. A grey toggle means you will not receive emails relating to this title.