sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2005-10-09 09:46 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2005-10-09 09:46 pm
Nervous women, Haunted houses
Of course now that I declared October scary movie month I'm looking at my DVDs thinking, "Huh, what do I have something to say about?" I was thinking about the things I wrote about The Shining, and the connection between the main characters' imagination and the house, and realized that two other classic haunted house movies use exactly this same idea.
Both these movies have, as their heroines, highly nervous women. I almost wrote "young women," but Miss Giddens, played by Deborah Kerr in The Innocents, and Eleanor, played by Julie Harris in The Haunting are actually more noticeably old than young. Miss Giddens is a governess on her first assignment and while in the book she is therefore young, Deborah Kerr clearly is no 18-year-old. This makes her come across as more of a spinster--which is exactly how Eleanor comes across; an older woman in a young girl's role. Miss Giddens is just starting out in her career (we don't know why this is her first job), while Eleanor, who cared for her sick mother for 11 years, now sleeps on the couch in her married sisters' living room, being treated like a child. When the narrator tells us the story of Hill House at the beginning of that movie, we learn that Abigail Crane died as an old woman in the house, possibly when her calls for help were ignored by a philandering young hired companion. It's tempting to draw a parallel between Eleanor and this companion, as they were both caretakers of old women who were potentially sick of their jobs, but more interesting to me is the fact that we're told Abigail Crane, "for some reason, always kept that same nursery room in the house where she grew up...and grew old." That nursery winds up being the most frightening room in the house. Eleanor, Abigail and Miss Giddens are all women who have yet to move from the nursery to the master bedroom. A woman kept from being a woman potentially creates dreadful supernatural results.
Hill House, like the Overlook Hotel, is not haunted by one specific ghost, but seems to be a bad place in itself. I've been told that in dreams houses represent the self, the psyche. Different rooms sometimes represent different things within that. Like, the attic represents some level of thought which I can't remember. I tend to dream about cellars and have always found cellars scarier than attics--I think they're supposed to represent your baser thoughts. Sometimes in dreams I'll be in the basement and aware of something scary on the top floor. Now, I don't think any dream symbolism is the same for everyone, but one can see why a house or some building would easily represent a self.
Bly, the haunted house of The Innocents, is indeed haunted by specific ghosts, those of Peter Quint, the sadistic ex-valet, and his tormented lover, Miss Jessel, the ex-governess. Miss Giddens comes to believe these two lovers are seeking to continue their affair through the two children she's caring for, Miles and Flora. "Comes to believe" is the best way to describe what she does. The script, mostly by Truman Capote, is brilliant in the way it shows Miss Giddens never putting things together logically so much as grabbing onto ideas she hears and working them into her story. When she glimpses Quint at the door she claims she's never seen him before-how could she have described him so perfectly if he hadn't really been there? Mrs. Grose, the maid, reminds her that she said she'd just seen his picture in the attic. It's always all too possible in this story that these ghosts are all in Miss Giddens' imagination.
Imagination again--in both these movies the fact that the central characters are imaginative potentially makes them vulnerable to madness or to ghosts. Most people involved in making The Innocents, when asked if the ghosts are real or if Miss Giddens is crazy, come down in the middle--she's not correct in her fantasies, but there's something really going on as well. That somehow seems to be what makes these kinds of haunted house stories (perhaps most haunted house stories) so spooky, that they take place where imagination and the supernatural meet. You can literally never tell which one is feeding the other.
The Innocents opens with the children's uncle (Michael Redgrave) interviewing Miss Giddens for her job. His first question: Do you have an imagination? Because "the truth can never be understood by any but imaginative people." He then goes on to explain that he wants Miss Giddens to take care of the children completely because he's not interested in doing that himself--he enjoys his bachelor life. Does she think that heartless? He seems to be asking her to use her imagination and turn his selfish attitude into something not-so-selfish and she obliges. So maybe her imagination is obscuring the truth even in this opening scene.
So here we have two women, past the age when you'd expect them to be starting out in life, starting out in life. Miss Giddens has never had a job. Eleanor is so non-existent in her own life that she has to show the man at the garage two forms of I.D. before he'll let her take the car she helped to pay for. Eleanor's brother-in-law jokes that she treats her desire to take a vacation at Hill House like "a jail break," but she's not breaking out of jail so much as trying to break into life. Eleanor has been invited to participate in a haunted house experiment because, as a child, she once made stones rain down on her house. It's not the ghosts that interest her. What she wants is her own story, a place in the world, to "belong." Miss Giddens is being hired, so their uncle says, to "belong" to the children, and let them "belong" to her.
Eleanor, like Miss Giddens, enjoys her trip to the house that awaits her--actually, Eleanor's thoughts on the drive ("By now they've realized the car is gone...they'd would never have suspected it of me...") sound more than anything like the thoughts of Marion Crane in Psycho, after she's stolen money from her boss. Eleanor's brother-in-law is right that she does seem to see her trip to Hill House as some sort of crime-Eleanor seems to consider all her desires naughty-she feels guilty for wanting anything for herself. Her sister continually reminds her that she really has no place, accepting rent from Eleanor even while expecting gratitude for letting her stay at her house. Eleanor may not seem to have quite the sexual obsession that Miss Giddens does, but she does refer to things she thinks of as wrong as “dirty” and Theo once points out that she mixes up “foolishness” with “wickedness.”
Eleanor is described as having trouble with her "nerves" rather than being overly imaginative, but she is imaginative. Like Miss Giddens, she takes bits and pieces of things she sees and incorporates them into the story in her head. As she drives down the road, Eleanor passes a house with two stone lions at the gate and thinks: "Someday I'll have an apartment of my own in a house with a pair of stone lions guarding the gate." Those lions turn up again in a conversation with her new roommate, Theo, only now Eleanor claims to already have an apartment and two stone lions sitting on the mantle. It took her week to pick them out, she says, and she brushes their teeth every night. Eleanor considers continuing to drive until she hits the end of the world and wonders if "all homeless people feel that way." Eleanor is homeless, as is Miss Giddens.
Bly and Hill House are both ripe for imagination. Bly because it is mostly empty, many of its rooms shut off and its attic filled with interesting junk. Miss Giddens says it is much bigger than the house where she grew up, which, unlike Bly, was too small to have secrets. She grew up in a house with little privacy-this is exactly the way Eleanor describes her years taking care of her mother, and it certainly describes her room at her sister's. Deprived of privacy (a room of their own?) both women build houses in their heads. Hill House, in contrast to empty Bly, is almost too stuffed. Eleanor's room is filled with little tables, lamps and chairs. The china, the rug, the bedspread, the canopy are all patterned differently, as are the walls. The house was literally made to recreate the inside of its builder's head-"all these wrong angles add up to one big distortion in the house itself" explains Eleanor. Both houses have lots of carvings of faces and statues (nice grotesque reflections of people)
Eleanor and Miss Giddens both desperately want to belong at their houses, and this is the source of the tension in the stories. In any haunted house tale you always have to wonder why people stay in the house. In both these cases the house--a home--is what the women are fighting for, possibly only against themselves. Miss Giddens gets along fine with the children until she suspects that it's all an illusion. The children “really” belong to Quint and Miss Jessel. At one point Mrs. Grose points out that the children have been good and she says, "But they haven't been good, merely easy to live with." Huh? She's rejected the surface pleasantness for some unnamed nastiness going on somewhere she can't see, but she insists is there. "It's beyond me why you go on asking a fellow questions," Miles once tells her, "when every time he answers, you tell him it isn't true." If asked, Miles might disagree with his uncle and say the truth can only be understood by unimaginative people if all imaginative people are like his governess. Miss Giddens' suspicions would sometimes really be funny if they weren't so ultimately destructive. It's unclear whether she's right about Miles' and Flora's possession and incestuous affair, but what is clear is that she will never believe it's not real.
Eleanor has a more obvious thing barring her from belonging. Hill House is occupied by her, Theodora, Luke (the nephew of the owner there to look after his property) and Doctor Markway, the head of the experiment. Theo (who is possibly psychic) has a disconcerting habit of announcing Eleanor's private thoughts (again she's got no privacy). Theo is not happy about Eleanor's crush on the doctor. Whenever Eleanor feels isolated by the people in the house, she's that much more vulnerable to the house itself. Eleanor does not know Dr. Markway is married, and seriously wants a future with him. Eleanor's desire to please Markway and get his attention may be part of why she has so many weird experiences in the house. Proving the supernatural exists is important to the doctor, and Eleanor seems to have at least once made something happen because she wished it. Whenever Eleanor has a strange moment the doctor tells her that's just what he's looking for--unfortunately these incidents also make the Doctor worry that he needs to send her home because she's so "nervous." They're interpreted by Luke and Theo as plays for the doctor.
Similarly, there is an odd moment in The Innocents where Miss Giddens finally decides to write to the children's uncle about her fears. She says she knows their uncle will think it's just some silly romantic ploy to get his attention. This line surprised me the first time I heard it, but now I see that there are subtle hints that it may be the uncle, and not the children she supposedly loves so much, that was the most attractive thing about this job. I would like to avoid the sexist reading that what both these women want is really a man, but I think it's true. "Journeys end in lovers meeting" Eleanor herself says. Both women are frustrated in their romantic fantasies and so turn elsewhere. Miss Giddens possibly transfers her sexual fantasies from uncle to child nephew (yipes!), while Eleanor makes due with a house when she learns the doctor is married.
However, I'd like to take it beyond sex. If both these women want to belong in the house, being the wife of the "man of the house" makes perfect sense. Even if Dr. Markway may not own Hill House, but he could give Eleanor a home that was really hers. Eleanor is rather angered by the advances of Theo, the lesbian, and doesn't want to be "unnatural" like her. She claims being left out is her greatest fear, and yet she always feels left out. I wonder if Theo's stated fear is "knowing what I really want" because she also already knows-she wants women. On the verge of being turned out of the house, Eleanor begs Luke to let her stay in the house and "earn her keep." Luke rather bluntly replies," You're not the kind of girl I keep."
Both movies end with the women really getting what they wanted, in tragic ways. Miss Giddens does force Miles to say Quint's name, and seems to consider herself to have successfully exorcised him. Unfortunately, Miles does not live to enjoy it. Eleanor is welcomed by Hill House and allowed to stay-when the house murders her. Like the Overlook Hotel, they seem to offer to their victims just what the victim wants, or a perversion of it. Miss Giddens and Eleanor start off longing more than anything for a connection with other people. Both wind up utterly alone in an empty house.
Both these movies have, as their heroines, highly nervous women. I almost wrote "young women," but Miss Giddens, played by Deborah Kerr in The Innocents, and Eleanor, played by Julie Harris in The Haunting are actually more noticeably old than young. Miss Giddens is a governess on her first assignment and while in the book she is therefore young, Deborah Kerr clearly is no 18-year-old. This makes her come across as more of a spinster--which is exactly how Eleanor comes across; an older woman in a young girl's role. Miss Giddens is just starting out in her career (we don't know why this is her first job), while Eleanor, who cared for her sick mother for 11 years, now sleeps on the couch in her married sisters' living room, being treated like a child. When the narrator tells us the story of Hill House at the beginning of that movie, we learn that Abigail Crane died as an old woman in the house, possibly when her calls for help were ignored by a philandering young hired companion. It's tempting to draw a parallel between Eleanor and this companion, as they were both caretakers of old women who were potentially sick of their jobs, but more interesting to me is the fact that we're told Abigail Crane, "for some reason, always kept that same nursery room in the house where she grew up...and grew old." That nursery winds up being the most frightening room in the house. Eleanor, Abigail and Miss Giddens are all women who have yet to move from the nursery to the master bedroom. A woman kept from being a woman potentially creates dreadful supernatural results.
Hill House, like the Overlook Hotel, is not haunted by one specific ghost, but seems to be a bad place in itself. I've been told that in dreams houses represent the self, the psyche. Different rooms sometimes represent different things within that. Like, the attic represents some level of thought which I can't remember. I tend to dream about cellars and have always found cellars scarier than attics--I think they're supposed to represent your baser thoughts. Sometimes in dreams I'll be in the basement and aware of something scary on the top floor. Now, I don't think any dream symbolism is the same for everyone, but one can see why a house or some building would easily represent a self.
Bly, the haunted house of The Innocents, is indeed haunted by specific ghosts, those of Peter Quint, the sadistic ex-valet, and his tormented lover, Miss Jessel, the ex-governess. Miss Giddens comes to believe these two lovers are seeking to continue their affair through the two children she's caring for, Miles and Flora. "Comes to believe" is the best way to describe what she does. The script, mostly by Truman Capote, is brilliant in the way it shows Miss Giddens never putting things together logically so much as grabbing onto ideas she hears and working them into her story. When she glimpses Quint at the door she claims she's never seen him before-how could she have described him so perfectly if he hadn't really been there? Mrs. Grose, the maid, reminds her that she said she'd just seen his picture in the attic. It's always all too possible in this story that these ghosts are all in Miss Giddens' imagination.
Imagination again--in both these movies the fact that the central characters are imaginative potentially makes them vulnerable to madness or to ghosts. Most people involved in making The Innocents, when asked if the ghosts are real or if Miss Giddens is crazy, come down in the middle--she's not correct in her fantasies, but there's something really going on as well. That somehow seems to be what makes these kinds of haunted house stories (perhaps most haunted house stories) so spooky, that they take place where imagination and the supernatural meet. You can literally never tell which one is feeding the other.
The Innocents opens with the children's uncle (Michael Redgrave) interviewing Miss Giddens for her job. His first question: Do you have an imagination? Because "the truth can never be understood by any but imaginative people." He then goes on to explain that he wants Miss Giddens to take care of the children completely because he's not interested in doing that himself--he enjoys his bachelor life. Does she think that heartless? He seems to be asking her to use her imagination and turn his selfish attitude into something not-so-selfish and she obliges. So maybe her imagination is obscuring the truth even in this opening scene.
So here we have two women, past the age when you'd expect them to be starting out in life, starting out in life. Miss Giddens has never had a job. Eleanor is so non-existent in her own life that she has to show the man at the garage two forms of I.D. before he'll let her take the car she helped to pay for. Eleanor's brother-in-law jokes that she treats her desire to take a vacation at Hill House like "a jail break," but she's not breaking out of jail so much as trying to break into life. Eleanor has been invited to participate in a haunted house experiment because, as a child, she once made stones rain down on her house. It's not the ghosts that interest her. What she wants is her own story, a place in the world, to "belong." Miss Giddens is being hired, so their uncle says, to "belong" to the children, and let them "belong" to her.
Eleanor, like Miss Giddens, enjoys her trip to the house that awaits her--actually, Eleanor's thoughts on the drive ("By now they've realized the car is gone...they'd would never have suspected it of me...") sound more than anything like the thoughts of Marion Crane in Psycho, after she's stolen money from her boss. Eleanor's brother-in-law is right that she does seem to see her trip to Hill House as some sort of crime-Eleanor seems to consider all her desires naughty-she feels guilty for wanting anything for herself. Her sister continually reminds her that she really has no place, accepting rent from Eleanor even while expecting gratitude for letting her stay at her house. Eleanor may not seem to have quite the sexual obsession that Miss Giddens does, but she does refer to things she thinks of as wrong as “dirty” and Theo once points out that she mixes up “foolishness” with “wickedness.”
Eleanor is described as having trouble with her "nerves" rather than being overly imaginative, but she is imaginative. Like Miss Giddens, she takes bits and pieces of things she sees and incorporates them into the story in her head. As she drives down the road, Eleanor passes a house with two stone lions at the gate and thinks: "Someday I'll have an apartment of my own in a house with a pair of stone lions guarding the gate." Those lions turn up again in a conversation with her new roommate, Theo, only now Eleanor claims to already have an apartment and two stone lions sitting on the mantle. It took her week to pick them out, she says, and she brushes their teeth every night. Eleanor considers continuing to drive until she hits the end of the world and wonders if "all homeless people feel that way." Eleanor is homeless, as is Miss Giddens.
Bly and Hill House are both ripe for imagination. Bly because it is mostly empty, many of its rooms shut off and its attic filled with interesting junk. Miss Giddens says it is much bigger than the house where she grew up, which, unlike Bly, was too small to have secrets. She grew up in a house with little privacy-this is exactly the way Eleanor describes her years taking care of her mother, and it certainly describes her room at her sister's. Deprived of privacy (a room of their own?) both women build houses in their heads. Hill House, in contrast to empty Bly, is almost too stuffed. Eleanor's room is filled with little tables, lamps and chairs. The china, the rug, the bedspread, the canopy are all patterned differently, as are the walls. The house was literally made to recreate the inside of its builder's head-"all these wrong angles add up to one big distortion in the house itself" explains Eleanor. Both houses have lots of carvings of faces and statues (nice grotesque reflections of people)
Eleanor and Miss Giddens both desperately want to belong at their houses, and this is the source of the tension in the stories. In any haunted house tale you always have to wonder why people stay in the house. In both these cases the house--a home--is what the women are fighting for, possibly only against themselves. Miss Giddens gets along fine with the children until she suspects that it's all an illusion. The children “really” belong to Quint and Miss Jessel. At one point Mrs. Grose points out that the children have been good and she says, "But they haven't been good, merely easy to live with." Huh? She's rejected the surface pleasantness for some unnamed nastiness going on somewhere she can't see, but she insists is there. "It's beyond me why you go on asking a fellow questions," Miles once tells her, "when every time he answers, you tell him it isn't true." If asked, Miles might disagree with his uncle and say the truth can only be understood by unimaginative people if all imaginative people are like his governess. Miss Giddens' suspicions would sometimes really be funny if they weren't so ultimately destructive. It's unclear whether she's right about Miles' and Flora's possession and incestuous affair, but what is clear is that she will never believe it's not real.
Eleanor has a more obvious thing barring her from belonging. Hill House is occupied by her, Theodora, Luke (the nephew of the owner there to look after his property) and Doctor Markway, the head of the experiment. Theo (who is possibly psychic) has a disconcerting habit of announcing Eleanor's private thoughts (again she's got no privacy). Theo is not happy about Eleanor's crush on the doctor. Whenever Eleanor feels isolated by the people in the house, she's that much more vulnerable to the house itself. Eleanor does not know Dr. Markway is married, and seriously wants a future with him. Eleanor's desire to please Markway and get his attention may be part of why she has so many weird experiences in the house. Proving the supernatural exists is important to the doctor, and Eleanor seems to have at least once made something happen because she wished it. Whenever Eleanor has a strange moment the doctor tells her that's just what he's looking for--unfortunately these incidents also make the Doctor worry that he needs to send her home because she's so "nervous." They're interpreted by Luke and Theo as plays for the doctor.
Similarly, there is an odd moment in The Innocents where Miss Giddens finally decides to write to the children's uncle about her fears. She says she knows their uncle will think it's just some silly romantic ploy to get his attention. This line surprised me the first time I heard it, but now I see that there are subtle hints that it may be the uncle, and not the children she supposedly loves so much, that was the most attractive thing about this job. I would like to avoid the sexist reading that what both these women want is really a man, but I think it's true. "Journeys end in lovers meeting" Eleanor herself says. Both women are frustrated in their romantic fantasies and so turn elsewhere. Miss Giddens possibly transfers her sexual fantasies from uncle to child nephew (yipes!), while Eleanor makes due with a house when she learns the doctor is married.
However, I'd like to take it beyond sex. If both these women want to belong in the house, being the wife of the "man of the house" makes perfect sense. Even if Dr. Markway may not own Hill House, but he could give Eleanor a home that was really hers. Eleanor is rather angered by the advances of Theo, the lesbian, and doesn't want to be "unnatural" like her. She claims being left out is her greatest fear, and yet she always feels left out. I wonder if Theo's stated fear is "knowing what I really want" because she also already knows-she wants women. On the verge of being turned out of the house, Eleanor begs Luke to let her stay in the house and "earn her keep." Luke rather bluntly replies," You're not the kind of girl I keep."
Both movies end with the women really getting what they wanted, in tragic ways. Miss Giddens does force Miles to say Quint's name, and seems to consider herself to have successfully exorcised him. Unfortunately, Miles does not live to enjoy it. Eleanor is welcomed by Hill House and allowed to stay-when the house murders her. Like the Overlook Hotel, they seem to offer to their victims just what the victim wants, or a perversion of it. Miss Giddens and Eleanor start off longing more than anything for a connection with other people. Both wind up utterly alone in an empty house.
no subject
I'm not much into horror movies, but I LOVE The Innocents. :)
Have you read "Turn of the Screw"? One of the things I've been meaning to read for years but haven't. *blush*
I've seen Britten's opera, though, very good stuff, too! :)
I've not seen The Haunting, I think.
no subject
I saw the Opera a few years ago too.:-)
And yes, I do think that's the idea with the governess. I can't really blame them for having that ambition, especially at a time when as a woman they couldn't really do much else.
Part I
I've never seen either of these two movies, but The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw are two of my all-time favorite stories, and from what you've written here, it sounds as if both of these film adaptations were pretty faithful to the originals.
One of the things that strikes me about both the Governess and Eleanor (going by their book incarnations here, of course, since I've not seen either movie) is that they're not only imaginative characters, but characters whose imaginations are unusually, hmmm...self-centered? I'm almost tempted to use the term 'narcissistic' here, or maybe even 'paranoiac.' It's not just that they fantasize a lot: they both do this very specific thing where they take things from the outside world and then imaginatively reconfigure those things to be all about themselves - or to be parts of the self-centered narratives they use their imaginations to create. They don't just imagine. They recycle, they coopt. In some ways, they deny the very existence of anything external to themselves.
I'm trying to think of examples of the sort of thing I mean here, but sadly, we're having some home construction done right now, and so most of my books are - the horror! the horror! - boxed up. So forgive me if my references are all going to have to be kind of vague.
You already mentioned the way that Eleanor recycles the stone lions she saw on the drive to Hill House to use as props in the fantasy she invents later on. I'm also thinking of this scene somewhere near the beginning of the book, where she's in a diner or a gas station or something, and she overhears someone talking about a child who would only drink from a particular cup. Eleanor immediately makes this snippet of overheard dialogue all about her. This is schizophrenic thinking, really. It's the way that paranoids think: they interpret everything in the world as being directly about
themselves.
The Turn of the Screw is a far more ambiguous work than The Haunting of Hill House, of course, because...dude! It's Henry James! But I think that the Governess is shown as doing much the same thing: she also displays that type of self-centered, paranoiac imagination. Once she has decided for herself "what is really going on" with Flora and Miles, she interprets absolutely everything as "proof" of the narrative that she's already written in her head. If the children look to where she thinks the ghosts are, that's proof that they've been corrupted; but if they don't turn to look, then that's even more damning proof of their corruption...
Again, this is paranoid thinking, and in the end, like Eleanor's fantasies, most of it is directed towards self-aggrandizement. In the fantasy that the Governess has invented, she is the heroine of the piece. She is the one who is going to save the children, she is the ghosts' Nemesis, the ghosts know this and they oppose her accordingly... she's the central, shining figure of the narrative that she has chosen to internalize.
Or maybe I should say "the narrative that she has chosen to externalize?" Because I think that what makes the Governess and Eleanor both so dangerous (and the books so scary) isn't really so much that they fantasize. It's that the particular way that both characters use their imaginations is all about denying the existence of the external, about weakening the boundaries between their own inner lives and the objective reality of the things and people around them.
(cont.)
Re: Part I
They are, very much so, I'm happy to say!
It's not just that they fantasize a lot: they both do this very specific thing where they take things from the outside world and then imaginatively reconfigure those things to be all about themselves - or to be parts of the self-centered narratives they use their imaginations to create. They don't just imagine.
Oh yes, that's just it. And I'm glad you remembered the other excellent example of Eleanor's, the child's cup of stars that Eleanor also co-opts for herself. I was very happy to see the movie kept at least one of these examples because they're pretty much the key to Eleanor.
The tension seems to be part of what makes it compelling, that Eleanor and the governess are both outwardly nothing, but inwardly narcissistic. It's all or nothing. Eleanor's life until Hill House is so sterile with her taking care of her mother and then living with her sister (a sister who acts as if *she* was the one who cared about her mother's well-being while Eleanor let her die). And yet Eleanor seems to consider herself responsible for her mother's death as well, and possibly was responsible for choosing not to help her at the wrong time.
There was a wonderful article in the magazine "Scarlet Street" about these two movies and reading it again it gets into some of the same things. It also made me make this weird connection--Eleanor describes Mrs. Markway (which I am now spelling correctly!) as having "taken her place" in the house, though she could also mean with her husband. It made me think of a line in "When Harry Met Sally..." of all things where Carrie Fisher advises Sally to remember that if she misses her change the guy for her will get married and she'll have to "spend the rest of her life knowing someone else is married to your husband." It's just funny in that movie, but really Eleanor does seem to look at the world as having cheated her. While she was taking care of her mother and being denied a life other people bought "her" stone lions, she got no cup of stars. So now she's collecting things to build her own life, only it's all imaginary, really belonging to other people. Eleanor is halfway excited even as she's being killed that something is at least happening to her.
Both women are in their own way very aware of life as a story; people with no stories have no lives. Since they don't seem to be the heroine of any story, they create one. Eleanor is the sought-after bride in hers, the one being pursued by the house, while Miss Giddens is the one who's going to save the children from evil. She even has a line in the movie (can't believe if it's in the book) where she tells Miles her father taught her to help people even if they refused her help.
Re: Part I
I think that Eleanor does come across as a more sympathetic character than Miss Giddens (I'd forgotten that she was named!), in part because we can see that in many ways, the world really has cheated Eleanor. Her desperate and narcissistic fantasizing seems far more forgivable and understandable, because we're told more details about her life. It's possible that if we knew more about Miss Giddens' past, she'd share in some of that pathos, but since we don't, she comes across as less sad and more monster-like.
The house is sort of giving Eleanor what she wants...but not really. I've always thought that part of what makes the ending of The Haunting of Hill House so exceptionally cruel is the way that the House seems to withdraw its influence over Eleanor at the very last minute, so that the very last thoughts of her life have to be: "OMG, no! What am I doing? I don't want this!" It almost seems as if it does that just to be mean, you know? Nasty, evil house.
Re: Part I
Yes, that is the last cruel twist, it really is. Makes you wonder what happened to those other people...
I guess the other thing about Eleanor is that it's not like she's in any position of responsibility. She's kind of the baby of the group in her way, while Miss Giddens takes charge and stirs things up.
Part II
In the Governess's case, her willingness to ignore the external reality of other people, to enforce her own fantasies upon them regardless of what they themselves desire, is rather chillingly concretized at the end by Miles' literal death. In Eleanor's case, her ability to impose her inner fantasies on the outside world is literalized and concretized in a slightly different way (and at the beginning of the book, rather than at its end): we are told that as a child, Eleanor may have caused stones to fall from the sky.
For me, in both of these books, there's this sense that the hauntings themselves are to some extent just a logical extension of the mind-set of both of these characters. There's a sense of an inexorable cosmic logic at work here: it's almost as if by failing to recognize or to maintain appropraite boundaries between Self and Other, these main characters sanction the hauntings, empower them, allow them to happen.
If the house represents the psyche, then a haunted house - a house that becomes literally haunted - is sort of like the ultimate expression of what can happen to you if you permit your internal and your external to become conflated, confused. It's almost as if the universe is telling these two characters: "You want to make all of external reality nothing but a reflection of your own psyche? Really? You really want that? You really want it All To Be About You? Well, ooooo-kay! You asked for it."
Although I agree with you that there's a cluster of sexist assumptions underlying the designation of both of these characters as single, childless, and seemingly desperate for romance, I also think that to some extent these descriptors tie in to their designation as fundamentally narcissistic. One doesn't get the impression that either woman wants a real lover. (In fact, it's rather hard to imagine what they'd even do with a real lover - an idea that I seem to remember Luke and Theo stating explicitly, and in quite brutal terms, too, to Eleanor somewhere
in the course of The Haunting of Hill House, although I can't off-hand remember the precise details right now.) What these women want is the idea of a lover, and what they both do is to try to project their own mental constructs of "lover" onto people who have no desire or interest in fulfilling that role for them. To my mind, this connects directly to their inability to see other people as other people, as people in their own right, as people external to themselves and their own fantasies.
I had some things I also wanted to say about The Shining here (again, though, the book and not the movie), but I think that it may have to wait for later. In brief, though, I also think that there are a number of scenes in the book in which Book!Jack is shown to have precisely the same problems with narcissism, projection, and problematic boundaries, so at least this isn't always portrayed as a Woman's Problem in the haunted house genre.
Just usually. :-(
Re: Part II
Miss Giddens is more villainous in that she destroys two children who have already been "used" by others. She's determined to know the truth about what happened and it does seem like a little honesty would be helpful in all this Victorian politeness. But then she, like Eleanor, rejects the real children and the real story in favor of what she wants to hear. She never tries to really talk to the children at all. Perhaps they would like to talk to someone--Miles seems like he might--but she's not interested in listening to them or drawing them out, she just wants them to say what she wants. In this way, actually, she's a lot like fanficcers writing angstfic cliche: the traumatized character always just has to be made to sit down with the lover character, who will insist he "tell her everything." He will spill his guts, she will instinctively understand as no one else could, and then he will be healed. It's really a narcissistic fantasy, and it's the one Miss Giddens has. She demands that Flora tell her she can see Miss Jessel, and instead frightens her into a fit (proving she was right, of course!).
Then, when left alone with Miles, she sometimes seems to accidentally come near the truth but not allow him to speak.
It's even played like this a bit--when Miles collapses and seems happy to give himself over to her comfort she blows it by insisting he once again say that he's been meeting Quint and Miles looks at her like she's just nuts. She doesn't understand at all.
The scene where she's interrogating Miles (in a steamy hothouse no less!) is doubly sad when you figure that Miles really does have a secret he perhaps would like to share, and she's poking at it for her own ends. This is where she finally asks him why he was sent home from school (having not asked the headmaster and just imagined he has a "corruptive" influence). He seems to really try to answer honestly and become more of a little boy, but she's listening to him like an eager animal waiting to spring on her prey. He says, "Because I'm different...I said things...Sometimes I heard things. Sometimes at night. Everything was dark. They screamed. The masters heard about it. They said I frightened the other boys."
It seems like there's something really troubling there, but what is it? She only replies by asking him where he "first heard of such things" as if she knows what he said, and then brings it back to Quint again in an openly accusing tone.
To my mind, this connects directly to their inability to see other people as other people, as people in their own right, as people external to themselves and their own fantasies.
I agree-and also that Book!Jack shows some of these same tendencies. It's neat, the more I think about it, how this seems to be at the heart of the "haunted house," where the house is a bad place in itself, like a twisted mind. There always seems to be this idea that the house is giving its inhabitants what they want and projecting their inner desires onto itself. Maybe all the best haunted house stories are love stories!
Actually, that gives me an idea of something I might write about next, though it's an out-of-print book so I don't know if many people have read it! I've been re-reading it again recently and damn if it doesn't come back to a lot of these themes in its own way, so I'll probably write about it anyway with spoiler warnings. It's a book called Robinsheugh by Eileen Dunlop.
Re: Part II
We never really find out, do we, which is part of what makes the story so unsettling. There's also a really disturbing whiff of that weird Victorian eroticization of the innocence of children here: it's "virgin or whore," but applied to little kids. Miss Giddens automatically assumes that Miles is somehow himself "corrupt," but from what he says here, it sounds as if he could have been a would-be whistle-blower to some serious abuse going on at his school. There's just no way of knowing, but simply by virtue of their apparent exposure to something less-than-innocent, the children must be viewed as themselves corrupted, complicit, bad.
Of course, Miss Giddens' relationship with Miles is really disturbingly sexualized anyway, which I think does get back into that cultural territory of frustrated single women being viewed simultaneously as pathetic and as dangerous, sexually inappropriate, sexually predatory.
I agree-and also that Book!Jack shows some of these same tendencies.
The scene I was specifically thinking about in The Shining (and again, I've got to paraphrase here rather than cite, sorry) was that chapter in which Jack encounters the wasp's nest on the roof of the hotel. Jack makes the wasps a metaphor about his life, but it's a really bad metaphor, because it's one that serves primarily to absolve him of any responsibility for his own actions. ("When the wasps sting you, what can you do? You're not responsible for how you behave when wasps sting you.")
The chapter's mainly taken up with a flashback, in which we're shown how Jack continues to try to lie even to himself about his culpability in a past event ("I swear to holy God, I didn't set that timer ahead". . . . "I didn't set the timer ahead, but if I had done, it wouldn't have been out of envy or spite, but out of pity". . . ."Okay, so maybe it's possible that I set the timer ahead, but if I did - which really, I'm almost certain that I didn't - it only would have been a few seconds, tops...") The nature of the internal monologue serves to reinforce exactly what is so flawed about the meaning which Jack has imposed upon the wasps. It's, uh, not particularly subtle. But then, this is King we're talking about - subtlety is not his strong point, bless him.
Of course, the wasps come back. Jack kills them, but they come back, just as we as readers know they're going to. It's one of the landmark events in the sequence by which the Overlook becomes more and more activated, more and more "alive," as the story progresses. But I always find myself wondering when I read the book: if Jack hadn't invested all of that meaning into the wasps' nest, if he hadn't projected his psyche onto the wasps by making them metaphor, would they have come back to life at all? Or, if he'd made them a less flawed metaphor, a metaphor less capable of leading him astray, would they have come back? I'm not entirely sure that they would have.
Jack is a writer, so he falls firmly into that category of Over-Imaginative Haunted House Protagonist. Unlike Movie!Jack, though, Book!Jack is capable of producing fiction. But what I take away from this sequence is that it's not just fiction that powers the batteries of the haunted house: it's specifically self-serving fiction. Not metaphor, but bad metaphor.
Re: Part II
Yes--or, using our more modern knowledge of how sexual abuse works, if Miles has been inappropriately exposed to adult sexuality by Quint he could be acting out at school in some way, and that might also explain his own seductive behavior (if it's not just Miss Giddens' projection).
Jack is a writer, so he falls firmly into that category of Over-Imaginative Haunted House Protagonist. Unlike Movie!Jack, though, Book!Jack is capable of producing fiction. But what I take away from this sequence is that it's not just fiction that powers the batteries of the haunted house: it's specifically self-serving fiction. Not metaphor, but bad metaphor.
Oh, what a great point, because I couldn't really think of the right way to describe what we know about Jack's fiction. He really seems to deal with everything the way he does his alcoholism, with that sort of, "It's not my fault because the alcohol controls me and now I'm going to drink more." It's not subtle, but yeah, it's King.:-)
Haunted house stories with male protagonists seem to play far more heavily on economic concerns, while those with female protagonists seem more deeply rooted in romance.
Thinking about it, isn't this what "house" has always traditionally meant for the two sexes anyway, really? To be "the man of the house" means you support your family, to be the "lady of the house" means you are married to the husband. In a case like Miss Giddens', for instance, what else could she be? Or the heroine in Rebecca is another obvious example. It is about economics because for women romance and economics were so often inseperable.
I've never read Robinsheugh, but now I'm tempted to hunt it down!
Obviously I think it's worth it. I'll be spoiling it any day now in writing about it.:-)
Re: Part II cont.
Jack in The Shining certainly does seem to fall in love with the hotel! His eventual acceptance of his role as its "caretaker" has romantic overtones. I'm also now thinking about Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, a novel which is far less harsh to its protagonist, and far less purely a haunted house story, but which still shares quite a few of these fictional elements. The nameless narrator has led a constrained existence from which Manderley represents both an escape and a liberation, but the fantasy of "truly belonging" to her new husband's estate - the fantasy of being Mistress of Manderley - ends up turning into a nightmare. And Rebecca is definitely - even explicitly - a love story in which the house itself plays the part of the beloved.
Haunted house stories with male protagonists seem to play far more heavily on economic concerns, while those with female protagonists seem more deeply rooted in romance. To Jack, the haunted hotel represents his one last chance to be a good provider to his family; to Eleanor, it's her one last chance to break free from her solitude and establish interpersonal relationships. But there's overlap between the two, I think. The collapse of Jack and Wendy's marriage is definitely a part of the horror of The Shining, and Rebecca's unnamed protagonist's concerns largely revolve around issues of money, status, and class. And I suppose that The Turn of the Screw's narrator's implied attraction to her employer can also be viewed in historical context as a "one last chance" for money and social status, as well as for romance.
I've never read Robinsheugh, but now I'm tempted to hunt it down!
Catching up on my flist
I've been told that in dreams houses represent the self, the psyche. Different rooms sometimes represent different things within that. Like, the attic represents some level of thought which I can't remember. I tend to dream about cellars and have always found cellars scarier than attics--I think they're supposed to represent your baser thoughts. Sometimes in dreams I'll be in the basement and aware of something scary on the top floor. Now, I don't think any dream symbolism is the same for everyone, but one can see why a house or some building would easily represent a self.
Yeah, I think the "house"/"appartment"/"room" (depending on how the person lives) is almost a universal symbol in dream language. According to Jung, cellars were supposed to represent pre-historic times and attics the future, but I don't put much stock into his dream theories, to be honest. I agree with you, that it probably represent different things for different people, depending on what experiences they have with cellars/attics, if any. I don't think I've ever dreamed about a basement myself, which probably has to do with the fact that I've always lived in appartments, and the basements just don't seem connected to them. I did have a nightmare about the attics once, though, when I was a child, and lived in an appartment which had attics instead of basement, so yeah. Maybe both attics/cellars often represent the unknown, or the subconscious or something?
The appartment, or house (because I sometimes dream about our summerhouse, or house in Norway, or versions thereof) tend to often have a central role in my dreams though, very often, both as a child and adult, I've dreamt about it being invaded some way or the other. Like people are coming in uninvited, or climbing up the walls peeking through the windows, or there's a bunch of rats, or other animals, that nest there and it gets out of controll, it's always very uncomfortable, and you never know when you'll be left alone. Somehow the haunted house stories, have that theme as well, the space of the protagonists keeps getting invaded, and they're not left alone. Maybe it's a universal fear as well, to have the one space where you're supposed to be able to be sure to be left alone, getting invaded?
Re: Catching up on my flist
Just so long as you saw the original, 1960s version, that's okay. If you saw the one with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson you didn't see it.:)
I must say that attics being the future doesn't sound right at all to me. Especially when you think about how attics are so associated with old stuff from the past. I think you're right that it mostly has to do with where you've lived. My brother's room was on the top floor when I was growing up, so it wasn't really an attic. It was the cellar that freaked me out far more.
Maybe it's a universal fear as well, to have the one space where you're supposed to be able to be sure to be left alone, getting invaded?
Oh yes, definitely. Especially if the house is a person, too. Or your mind. No wonder these movies get connected to madness!
Re: Catching up on my flist
no subject
It reminds me of a video game series that I'm going through called Silent Hill. The series is named not for a specific house, but an entire town; but the town acts like an inflated version of the haunted house. Each game has a different protagonist, and the town itself, the monsters and such that you run into, all kind of change with each one. The second game, especially, is really all about people who have sinned and committed murder, and how they can't move past that--so the town, for them, exists as the reminder/punishment of what they've done. Though as different protagonists have awful creepy things happen in the town, there's a lot of indication that there's some actual external supernatural stuff going on.
no subject
no subject
The Silent Hill series started with the first game on Playstation. The first one is pretty much the weakest of the series, though, and games 2 and 4 are side stories without much of any connection to the plot of 1, so if you don't have a PS1 you could probably be fine just reading a plot summary.
The next three games (there are 4 now) are on PS2. They're also available on Xbox or PC if you don't have a console.
The first one is a bit hokey and the older graphics kind of hamstring it a bit, but it's totally uphill from there. It's quite a good series. Fairly self-contained (though 3 is kind of a sequel to 1) but filled with tons of little hints and details that link the games together and give more details about the town.