Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House
Different people have different explanations for why horror fiction exists, and why it’s worthwhile. It’s always seemed to me that, whatever else it does, good horror writing expresses some kind of fear or terror that is both deep and common. Insofar as the fear’s deep, the horror story touches a profound well of emotion, as good fiction usually does; insofar as it’s common the story links readers together and reminds us that we share the same dreads. So at its best, horror fiction is empathic and profound.
And something else: it can articulate fear in a new way. Mary Shelley tapped into new fears of her time about scientists and Faustian Romantics. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories articulating fears arising from a new scientific worldview, in which humanity was not only displaced from the centre of creation, but proved to be an accident or irrelevance in a fundamentally inhuman universe. At least as far back as the first wave of Gothic novelists in the late eighteenth century, writers were finding an imaginative form for writing about the fears of women (in particular) in an extremely patriarchal society; the usual plot involved an innocent female protagonist, a sinister edifice or castle, and a demonic male figure, lord of the estate, who gets the heroine in his clutches. It’s been said that the typical Gothic is a love story between a woman and a house.
Gothics are still being written, though not quite in the eighteenth century mold. The best of them have changed, incorporating new fears, reflecting new times. So one of the greatest of twentieth century horror stories, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, is both a bravura reprise of the Gothic tradition and also a radical updating of the form. It finds new dimensions to the fears it raises and summons. Gender has a relevance to those fears, but not I think in the way of the old Gothics. There is a dreadful universality to the disquiet Jackson evokes. The book revises its tradition, but also mixes old fears with new. So let’s take a look at it, and see how it all works, and what we have to be scared of.
