“Help Eleanor Come Home”: The Queer Horror of The Haunting of Hill House

I seem to have developed a reputation. I get asked to read at events with titles like “Bloodlines and Bodies.” I’m the first person people ask when they need a buddy to go see a scary movie. Recently a friend texted me with a request that I recommend “books with cannibalism.” My fiction workshop knows that when it’s my week to submit a story, they’re getting something strange or supernatural, whether it’s a creature feature, body horror, or a classic haunted house story. And yet, my personal history with horror is far shorter than people think it is. It’s true that I was an odd kid drawn to the macabre. To the mixed amusement and disgust of my parents, I devoured books on Egyptian mummies, the Black Death, shark attacks, the sinking of the Titanic, and more. I would then spout facts I had learned, often at inopportune times. But I had a hard time with anything that was intentionally trying to scare me.

This would change in 2020, when I took a class on Gothic literature. This was the one class I took that year that I never missed or fell behind on the reading for. I always had my camera on. I would learn over the course of this class that there’s a lot of queerness present in Gothic, and horror in general. Gothic and horror are both fundamentally about the violation of social norms and rules–corruption of the nuclear family, the domestic sphere, religious institutions, gender, and sexuality are themes that appear over and over again. As a majority-queer class at a very queer historically-women’s college, we were most interested in the subtle queerness of these texts, searching for hints of ourselves in books like Dracula, Carmilla, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and others.

I always felt a strange mix of identification and pain when reading these books. This seems to be a common feeling for queer people who love horror. My favorite essay collection, It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, is full of stories like this. Consuming horror, for me, is a strange mix of the pleasure of identification and the pain of realizing that I usually identify with the monster. Queer vampires are a fun concept until I remember that they stem from a fear of transgressive sexuality. I felt this most keenly reading Carmilla and seeing the image of the predatory lesbian, an image that follows me in real life too.

We concluded the semester with The Haunting of Hill House, the most contemporary book we would read. I thought I knew the story already; my family and I watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix when it came out in 2018. Rather, my parents did–I made it through one episode and was so terrified by the image of Nell Crain as the Bent-Neck Lady that I slept on my sister’s floor afterwards (I was seventeen and she was thirteen, so I’m not sure how I expected her to protect me). It was the book I was the least excited to read, and so I waited until midnight the day before class to even crack the spine. I read the opening paragraph in a silent house by the light of one dim yellow lamp:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone” (1).

At 2:00, I closed the book. I had read the entire thing without moving or stopping. At this point, I needed to use the bathroom, but the dark hallway outside my bedroom was suddenly menacing. I imagined I heard a light thumping at the door, as if someone was drumming their fingers against the other side. In this moment, I was Eleanor, the protagonist of Hill House, listening as something outside her bedroom tries to tap and cajole its way in.

Eleanor Vance is the 32-year-old protagonist of The Haunting of Hill House. After spending eleven years caring for her ailing, demanding mother, she is isolated, fanciful, anxious, and desperate to find where she belongs. She comes to Hill House at the invitation of Dr. Montague, a researcher looking for evidence of the paranormal. The other two characters who arrive at Hill House are the vivacious, lovely (and implied, queer) Theodora, and Luke, who will inherit Hill House. Eleanor’s trip to Hill House is more of a flight–after her mother’s death, she longs for something to happen. Rather than stay with her equally overbearing sister, she steals their shared car and drives the hundred miles to Hill House. I was immediately compelled by her. Eleanor was, to me at least, obviously queer, but equally important was that she was not a monster. She was just a woman.

Eleanor’s narration is immediately consuming. Her imagination is vivid and rich. She encourages herself through her journey to Hill House by telling herself stories, often repeating to herself, “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” In one of my favorite passages of all time, she observes a family with a little girl in a diner. The little girl refuses to drink milk out of the diner cups, insisting that she wants her cup from home, which has stars on the bottom. When she drinks her milk, she can see the stars. In this passage, we see that although Eleanor suffers from anxiety, she has a subtle, defiant will:

“Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smill, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl” (15).

Eleanor has many lovely moments on her drive where she passes something beautiful and imagines herself as part of it, whether it’s imagining herself living in a cottage she passes or seeing herself as a princess in a field of oleander. However, these thoughts leave her head the instant she sees Hill House. Hill House’s “absolute reality” cuts through Eleanor’s daydreams; it picks up on her fears and begins to amplify them as soon as she sets eyes on the house, first through a deep sense of dread, and later, physical manifestations of the supernatural. Eleanor’s anxieties have a deeply queer resonance: What if there is no place for me? What if no one wants me? Where can I go if I can’t go home?

Eleanor’s mantra to herself throughout the book is, “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” It is no coincidence that the next person who arrives at Hill House is Theodora. Theodora awakens something in Eleanor. They immediately strike up an intimate, romantic friendship. Theodora is also heavily implied to be queer–she comes to Hill House after a fight with her “roommate” who many interpret as her partner. While Eleanor experiences anxiety and fear around her sexuality, Theodora is confident in her own. Initially, her relationship with Theodora makes Eleanor braver. Their budding friendship helps them cope with their first days at Hill House, and Eleanor begins to act outside of her mother’s influence, wearing trousers and bright colors and imagining a life for herself outside of her family. She even allows Theodora to paint her nails red, although she experiences a moment of intense guilt afterwards. “It’s horrible…it’s wicked,” she says, and Theodora responds, “You’ve got foolishness and wickedness somehow mixed up” (86). The house cannot let this relationship last, and the most graphic event in the novel is deliberately meant to drive them apart. Theodora discovers that something has written “Help Eleanor Come Home” on her bedroom wall in what appears to be blood and smeared the blood on her clothes. Although Theodora later says this is not the case, her initial instinct is to accuse Eleanor. Later, they determine that the “blood” is paint, and though the nail polish is never mentioned again, the connection is clear. The two women almost confess their feelings for each other, but that too is corrupted by the house. Towards the end of the book, the two walk together on the grounds, and the question they both want to ask is explicitly stated to be “Do you love me?” They know “what the other was thinking and wanting to say” (Jackson 129) but before either can say it, the path they are on loses color and they come up on a picnic. The scene is peaceful, but Theodora screams, having seen something Eleanor couldn’t, and they run away in fear. Theodora could be a chance for Eleanor to find a place of love and belonging, and the corruption of their relationship takes that chance away, leaving only Hill House. In the next chapter, Eleanor gives herself up to the house, feeling that it is the only option that she has left.

The house rewards Eleanor for this submission. She can hear everything in the house, she believes, although it’s never made clear whether what she’s hearing is true or further manipulation from the house. She stops feeling afraid and begins to participate in the haunting, going on a wild midnight run through the house in which she bangs on doors and runs away laughing. Her revulsion for the house is replaced with a deep love and she comes to think of it as her home. Fearing for her sanity, the other occupants of Hill House decide to send her away. Even in this act of supposed kindness, everyone fails to protect her one last time. Dr. Montague rejects the idea of sending someone with her to ensure that she is safe. The house’s influence is too strong, and rather than return to her sister’s house where she feels unwanted, Eleanor is convinced that she belongs at Hill House, and drives her car into a tree. “In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?” (182). Her last coherent thoughts mirrored my own throughout the book. Why does everyone fail Eleanor so badly? Eleanor’s unspoken queerness makes it easy for the house to isolate her, but unlike any other queer-coded horror I had read before, her sexuality is not portrayed as monstrous. I did not feel the same conflict I felt reading other Gothic novels. My horror in reading Hill House came from a place of deep sympathy for Eleanor and anger at how the other characters treat her and fail to intervene when the house chooses her as its target. The greatest tragedy of The Haunting of Hill House is that even though Eleanor attempts to give her life for the house, she cannot belong there. After all, we are reminded on the last page, “Whatever walked there, walked alone.” But the resonance of The Haunting of Hill House for me is that it also communicates that what befalls Eleanor is not narrative punishment for her sexuality. It represented a different possibility for queer horror, in which homophobia is depicted as serious and terrifying, and in which queer characters are depicted as human beings with stories worth being told.