The Haunting of Hill House Read Online Free

most astutely puts it, “of knowing what we really want.” “I am always afraid of being alone,” Eleanor offers, an astonishing remark, considering how many of her fantasies involve solitude and seclusion.
    Eleanor’s insight into other people is no better than her grasp of her own nature. If she listened more carefully, with less of the self-absorption and hunger for attention that she’s so quick to spot and condemn in the others, she would see that her three companions have had no better luck with families than she has had. “I never had a mother,” Luke tells her, a lament that both Eleanor and Theo regard as the hackneyed confidence of a seducer, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. (Later, Luke’s observation that Hill House is “a mother house. . . . Everything so soft. Everything so padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once,” suggests he knows whereof he speaks.) From one of her passing jokes, we know that Theo spent vacations at her empty boarding school. The doctor is married (to a silly, domineering woman), but his family is also missing something; he hasn’t had the chance, he explains, to test the soporific effects of Richardson’s Pamela on small children.
    For a while, these four people manage to cobble together a kind of mock romance of family life: Luke, Theo, and Eleanor roll around on the grass eating wild strawberries while Dr. Montague beams down on them in fond amusement. This is just a game, though, like the excruciatingly arch banter about bullfighters, courtesans, and disguised princesses they indulge in on the first night. Only Eleanor, not surprisingly, can’t tell that it’s not real. Theo, the one person in Hill House who offers Eleanor the difficult prospect of connection, is a flawed and prickly customer, to be sure, but she’s also the one who shows her the most tender concern. When the entity haunting Hill House offers Eleanor a cold, false, phantom hand to hold, it is disguised as Theo’s hand. The friction between the two women flares when Eleanor envies Theo’s looks and freedom of manner (the first dig between them is Eleanor’s sniping at Theo’s appetite) or when Theo tries to coax Eleanor out of her shell or, most explosively, when she suggests that Eleanor might own some responsibility for what’s happening. Theo’s implication that Eleanor is not really the meek creature she appears to be may be what terrifies and infuriates Eleanor most; perhaps they both suspect that the most fearsome beast lurking in Hill House is Eleanor’s stifled rage at her mother, her sister, her life, her self.
    In the strangest of the novel’s ghostly manifestations, Theo and Eleanor quarrel over Luke and stalk out of the house together into the night. Between them lies a knot of anger and pain but also genuine intimacy; they are acutely aware of each other: “Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other.” Eleanor has somehow blundered to the brink of a relationship in which she might learn to accommodate someone else’s imperfections without hating her. At this moment, the world around the two women begins to change, the moonlit patterns of dark and light reverse themselves like a photographic negative: the path becomes dark and the surrounding trees and bushes white. “Now I am really afraid.” Eleanor thinks, in “words of fire.” Something moves almost imperceptibly around them in the “blackness and whiteness and evil luminous glow.” Then the path ends and the two women are confronted with a hallucinatory Technicolor vision of a garden in which delighted children play with a puppy while a mother and father watch affectionately from a checked picnic blanket spread on the grass. Then Theo looks over her