As the novel proceeds, it’s hard to discern where Hill House’s darkness ends and Eleanor’s personal agitation begins. Montague, an investigator of paranormal phenomena who believes that the house is haunted. During a conversation, she thinks, “Why am I talking?” Later, she confesses, “I’m no good at talking to people and saying things.” Eleanor, rootless in the wake of her mother’s death, has come to Hill House for the summer to assist Dr. “I am very foolish,” she frets in one moment. 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. But anxiety is nothing new to Eleanor, a shy 32-year-old woman who’s spent the past 11 years nursing her invalid mother. Hill House is less a home than a panic attack, a fog of anxiety and dread that disrupts Eleanor’s physiological state. As Eleanor stands on the veranda of Hill House, it comes “around her in a rush,” enveloping her, swallowing her whole. 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. W hen 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.
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