osprey_archer | Wednesday Reading Meme

I’ve had a bad cold (or a mild flu? Hard to tell the difference) since the 21st, so the last few days of the Christmas season passed by in a feverish blur and I never did make the buche de noel because I couldn’t spend that long away from the sanctuary of the blankets. But I did do a lot of reading! So that was nice, I suppose.

I wanted to read the first Mrs. Pollifax book but the library had a horrible copy where the binding swallowed the last word in each line of type, so in that I was defeated. But I’m assuming this is a series where it doesn’t matter too much if you start at the beginning? I could just jump forward till I find a book more graciously bound.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette has been on my reading list for basically as long as I’ve had a written reading list and I FINALLY read it this weekend. Why did I wait so long? This is full of fascinating tidbits about the history of paint, and how people created all sorts of colors in the days before aniline dyes. I particularly enjoyed the bits about how the physical properties of paint affect paintings over time: a lot of Turner’s works, for instance, look very different today than he did when he painted them, because he loved to experiment with new paints and they often faded or reacted oddly with each other over the years.

I finished Remember, Remember! The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby - my favorite story I think was “Truth Is Not Sober,” in which Truth (drunk off her head, of course) invades the study of a novelist who prides himself on the sober reality of his narrow stories of middle-class life in which nothing much ever really happens, and shows him that the kind of action that he derides as melodramatic is taking place all around him.

But! But! I’ve been saving the best for last. I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Actually I wanted to read Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, because I read

truepenny’s review and it sounded like exactly the sort of thing I would like (a classic demon lover tale! But they’re both girls!), only the library didn’t have it… but it turns out that The Haunting of Hill House also features an intense female friendship, so that worked out well.

The story starts when Dr. Montague, a paranormal researcher, rents the famously haunted Hill House for the summer. He invites three young assistants to help him: Luke, the vaguely dissolute heir; Theodora, a young woman who once went into an ESP lab on a lark and scored astonishingly high; and Eleanor, our main viewpoint character, whose house was invaded by a poltergeist when she was twelve.

Luke and Theodora are looking for an interesting summer adventure. Eleanor, however, hopes it will open the doorway for a wider escape from her life.

In her review of The Haunting of Hill House (which discusses both the book and the recent Netflix version), Abigail Nussbaum describes Jackson’s book as a story about “women who have been failed by men.” But this strikes me as a reading with little textual support: Eleanor hasn’t been failed by men, but by her mother and her sister, neither of whom loved her and both of whom have tried to squash her independence. And the person who hurts Eleanor most at Hill House is Theodora - not because Theodora is mean, or dislikes her, but in fact precisely because Theodora is her friend. That friendship arouses such extravagant hopes in Eleanor that Theodora can’t possibly live up to them.

There is an erotic tinge to some of their interactions (Theodora touches Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor, overwhelmed, pulls away), but this is a side note to their relationship, not the core of their problems. The issue is that Eleanor wants far more from Theodora than Theodora is willing to give - not in terms of sex, but in emotional intensity.

By the end of the week she’s telling Theodora that she intends to go home with Theodora when the experiment ends, and Theodora, aghast (as who would not be?) is begging her to reconsider. They’ll write letters, she promises. They’ll visit each other. They’ll have that picnic by the creek that they’ve been talking about.

These are quite generous promises to make to someone she’s known less than a week, but to Eleanor it feels unendurably cruel to be fobbed off like this. She’s been alone and lonely for so long that trying to solace herself with the normal intensity of friendship is like trying to warm up with a single candle flame while freezing to death.

There’s also an almost-love triangle with the young man in the party, Luke, but he’s never really important: the one time that Eleanor is alone with him, she notes how dull she finds him. She’s looking for, half-hoping for perhaps?, a love triangle because at least that would be more vital emotional warmth - but also because she’s hoping for a definite sign from either one of them (preferably Theodora but she wouldn’t mind if it was Luke) that they like her best, she’s the favorite. But instead they’re both indiscriminately friendly.

(One of the most chilling scene in the story is a sequence with no supernatural elements at all - when Eleanor sneaks around the house, eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to hear someone discuss her - and finds that no one is talking about her at all.)

Hill House, on the other hand, wants her. True, it’s an evil house and it wants to destroy her (insofar as we can know anything about what the house wants; it remains mostly opaque) - but it wants her as fiercely as she needs to be wanted. And once you understand that, the ending becomes inevitable.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working away at Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Will hopefully have more to say about it once I’m done reading it?

I’ve also begun Helen Dawes Brown Two College Girls, which is one of the earliest women’s college novels - published in 1886 - and moderately interesting so far, although I’m still only a few chapters in.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have hopes for Shirley Jackson’s Life among the Savages, her humorous memoirs about raising her children. This book sounds about as different as it possible to be from the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and I am fascinated by the contrast.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rachelmanija

Mrs Pollifax: after book one it doesn't matter much, and you could jump in anywhere. But seeing how she gets started is really fun.

From:

sovay

But seeing how she gets started is really fun.

Agreed. I'm pretty sure I started with the one where she goes to Thailand and backtracked, but she has a good origin story when you get there.

From:

osprey_archer

I might dive in and work backward to book one once I get the chance to read a copy with all the words intact.

From:

evelyn_b

my favorite story I think was “Truth Is Not Sober,” in which Truth (drunk off her head, of course) invades the study of a novelist who prides himself on the sober reality of his narrow stories of middle-class life in which nothing much ever really happens, and shows him that the kind of action that he derides as melodramatic is taking place all around him.

That is delightful.

I wanted to read the first Mrs. Pollifax book but the library had a horrible copy where the binding swallowed the last word in each line of type,

. . . and this is terrible! Who allowed this to happen?

I hope you feel better soon!

Edited Date: 2018-12-27 05:23 am (UTC)

From:

evelyn_b

p.s. that story reminds me of this famous statue of Eca de Queiroz:

http://www.aviewoncities.com/img/lisbon/kvept0776s.jpg

the woman is "truth" and she appears to be in a bit of a state.

From:

osprey_archer

OH MY GOD I love that statue. THE MOST EMO TRUTH. You do you, girl!

From:

evelyn_b

I thought you might! <3

From:

amaebi

From:

asakiyume

Somehow I have this impression that Truth doesn't open up for just any old dude. YOU HAVE TO HAVE THE MUSTACHES TO GET OPEN-ARMED TRUTH.

From:

osprey_archer

Truth is OVERCOME. Truth needs to SHARE. No one will do but the mustached man!

From:

amaebi

Tut.

Now I see that I shall have impress on Chun Woo that Mustaches are not Charisma.

From:

asakiyume

You'll be the spiritual voice on one shoulder---but on the other will be Salvador Dali, in all his waxed-mustached wonder!

From:

amaebi

And between us, Chun Woo's smooth upper lip.

From:

asakiyume

Gird your loins!!

From:

amaebi

And/or mustache.

From:

asakiyume

If you show that photo to Chun Woo, I don't see how you can possibly win the mustache battle....

From:

amaebi

That is a solemn warning, and I thank you.

From:

amaebi

I have shown him. "Tat man may have spent many of his years trying to do that, and in that time may not have done many interesting things, such as a trip to visit the grandsons."

So I think he's safe depending on his native and non-hirsute charisma.

From:

asakiyume

Attaboy, Chun Woo! Well reasoned!

From:

missroserose

I actually haven't read Hill House yet, but your description makes it sound like everything I love about Jackson. She's always seemed to understand that supernatural horror in itself isn't half so dramatically interesting without the way it interplays with people's insecurities, bringing out their dysfunctional and destructive tendencies.

I don't know if biographies are your thing at all, but there's an excellent one about her that came out a couple of years ago and gives some fascinating (if also depressing) insight into her home life and where a lot of the inspiration from her writing may have come from.

I picked up Life Among the Savages half-expecting horror and thus was mildly confused...I actually checked at one point as to whether this was the same Shirley Jackson who'd written "The Lottery", haha. But as I went on I started to see some of the parallels—there's a similar sense of dissociation from relationships, of wanting intimacy and acknowledgement and validation but (due to personal shortcomings or social pressures) not being able to find it other than at the most surface level. In a way it's almost a horror novel about female domestic life in the 1950s...

From:

osprey_archer

Yes. The supernatural horror of Hill House wouldn't matter if Eleanor weren't already such a damaged person as to find "the house wants me!" an irresistible lure. IIRC in We Have Always Lived in the Castle there's no supernatural element at all (except Merricat's continued attempts at sympathetic magic, but those may not actually do anything), but that doesn't make it any less terrifying. Moreso, possibly. All of this could actually happen.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

From:

radiantfracture

Love Hill House.

It's been a few years, but it seemed to me that Jackson very artfully leaves openings to read Theodora as queer (do we get the gender of her partner back home? I remember an exchange that works something like "We fixed up an apartment" / "Oh, you're married?" / "No." This obviously could mean unmarried cohabitation with a man, but doesn't actually have to mean that.) Does that fit with your reading?

From:

osprey_archer

I think so. The conversation about Theodora's home cuts off really abruptly - which given the time period could mean unmarried cohabitation with a man just as much as a female partner - but either way it really gives the sense that she's hiding something.

From:

skygiants

I definitely read Theodora as queer, without question - so much that I even forgot there might be a question in it.

From:

asakiyume

I read some Isabel Allende short stories and gradually found myself disliking them more and more, the opposite of when I read Chekhov short stories. ... Possibly I'd like others if I tried again. But it's like getting a bad taste in your mouth; it makes it hard to take another bite.

House + Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House sounds like a codependent, destructive relationship.

From:

osprey_archer

I've never read any of her short stories. Was there anything in particular that put you off about them?

House + Eleanor is a codependent destructive relationship and that's the way House likes it. What would House even do with a healthy relationship? Become one of those boring non-haunted houses? Not on your life.

From:

asakiyume

Well here's a nice turn of events: I picked up the paperback of short stories I had to see if I could recall what had set me against them and realized it was just one story. The preceding one had been all-right-not-brilliant. And then, with DW open to reply to this, I read the next one and really liked it!

So thank you! You cured me of my impression that I disliked Isabelle Allende! I will read a few more.

From:

osprey_archer

Yay! Happy ending!

From:

amaebi

It is the ghost of Mistress Pat of Silver Bush, extended its long bony lath fingers.

From:

skygiants

I liked Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle so much that I immediately vowed to go and read the rest of everything Shirley Jackson ever wrote.

...I have not actually read a Shirley Jackson book since because I haven't gotten around to investigating where it would be worth going next, but the vow remains!