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.
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.