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.
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