Shirley Jackson's Posthumanist Ghosts:Revisiting Spectrality and Trauma in The Haunting of Hill House
In her 1959 gothic tour de force, The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson engages spectrality as a means to grapple with the traumas inflicted by mid-century American ideologies that codify identity under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. By inviting the reader into the consciousness of a traumatized subject, Jackson reveals how the mind vulnerable enough to be haunted opens itself to the ethical possibilities that become available when one abandons the human as a valid ontological construct. Jackson's traumatized subject is a ghostly consciousness that negotiates a mesh of bodies, historical moments, and social identities while retaining some semblance of individual personhood. Trapping this spectral trans-subject within an archive of ghost stories, Jackson stages the painful and oppressive interactions between the traumatized subject and the social world that attempts to defer, package, and expunge her experiences as an effort to retain the hegemony of the human.
Shirley Jackson ends her most recognized novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), with the mystifying death/suicide of her main character, Eleanor Vance: "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?" (232). In the chapters leading up to this disquieting interrogation, Jackson portrays Eleanor's consciousness as increasingly expansive and multivalent, unmoored from the established coordinates of the traditional humanist subject. Instead of a unitary mind bound by an ostensibly human body that, together, denote a comprehensive identity, Nell slips in and out of her body, through the very boards of Hill House and into the surrounding landscape. She channels memories, thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions that seem to originate outside of her discrete personality. She experiences the world not primarily as a person but as an assemblage of minds, non-human organisms, and even objects. As a result of this beautiful but unnerving trans-subjective characterization, readers are left without a stable understanding of what actually happens in the novel's concluding sequence. Does one of Hill House's many ghosts possess Nell and influence her to crash her car into the tree? Does Nell act out in an instance of severe emotional distress, scrabbling desperately for attention and care? Does she pursue intentionally an eternal home as one of Hill House's ghostly inhabitants? Does she cast off her human identity entirely and transubstantiate into the house itself or the very concept of home?
What becomes clear with even a cursory examination of this scene is that Jackson employs the conventions of the ghost story and literary [End Page 53] modernisms to do more than register the psycho-social problems associated with the gothic trope of the fragile damsel who disintegrates into madness. Yet, overwhelmingly, critics read this moment as an illustration of the domesticated female imagination that has been driven mad by the oppressive workings of patriarchal authority.1 While valuable, this interpretation legitimizes the authenticity of the traditional humanist subject and thus underestimates the value of Jackson's exploration of alternative models of subjectivity, perhaps especially as they relate to the elusive realities of trauma.
Recent work by Marta Caminero-Santangelo and Jodey Castricano reframes humanist readings of The Haunting of Hill House by theorizing Jackson's literary engagement with posthumanist modes of being. Noting the misogynistic implications of labeling the pained or traumatized woman as "mad," Caminero-Santangelo divorces Jackson's conception of the subject from humanist discourses of mental illness and imagine instead "the capacity of multiple [subject] 'positions' to coexist simultaneously in a way precluded … by dominant ideology" (78). Working along similar lines, Jodey Castricano argues that "although we seem privy to Eleanor's thoughts throughout the novel, we are never sure if she is aware of thinking them or, paradoxically, if they even belong to her" (92). Ultimately, Castricano concludes: "we may be dealing with more than one 'consciousness'" (87). Together, these critics substantiate Jack-son's interest in posthumanist subjectivities; however, neither Camenero-Santangelo nor Castricano venture theses on the consequences or cultural work of Jackson's peculiar brand of critical posthumanism.2 Jackson's posthumanist sensibilities reveal an ethical impulse at the heart of her work that invites readers to become attentive to the realities of the traumatized subject. From Hangsaman's Natalie Waite to We Have Always Lived in the Castle's Merricat Blackwood, Jackson's posthumanist subjects are often, if not always, victims of severe but often subtle abuse, suggesting that what has been identified previously by Jackson scholars as evidence of "madness" could be rethought as evidence of trauma.3
Perhaps the most valuable framework through which to read Jack-son's engagement with ethics, posthumanist subjectivity, and trauma is what Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren term Spectrality Studies. Working from Jacques Derrida's meditation on the figure of the ghost in the early nineties and since spanning to include work in the rest of the humanities and the social sciences, spectrality studies unhinges the ghost from its gothic and psychoanalytic histories, reconfiguring it as an [End Page 54] ethical category that destabilizes the traditional ontology of the humanist subject from a posthumanist vantage point. Within this conceptual orbit, the ghost is both the "Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving" (Davis 53) as well as a "discourse, a system of producing knowledge" (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren "Introduction" 1).4 As both ethical category and epistemological discourse, the ghost can be seen as the figure par excellence for both trauma studies and posthumanist ethics.5 Through reckoning with the ghost, the principal organizing structure of subjectivity opens up to a "becoming with" the human and nonhuman other, privileging the posthumanist conception that "the human is not now, and never was, itself" and that "the other-than-human resides at the very core of the human itself" (Wolfe 9). Within literary narratives, such posthumanist thought offers access to traces of traumatic experience that remain inaccessible to traditional ontological and social frameworks, revealing how the concept of the human often hinders the ability to work through trauma as both individuals and communities.
Through The Haunting of Hill House's Eleanor Vance, Jackson engages the ghost and spectrality as a means to grapple with the traumas inflicted by mid-century American ideologies that codify identity under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. By inviting the reader into the consciousness of a traumatized subject, Jackson reveals how the mind vulnerable enough to be haunted opens itself to the ethical possibilities that become available when it abandons the human as a valid ontological construct. Jackson's traumatized subject is a ghostly consciousness, a posthumanist, trans-subjective awareness that negotiates a mesh of bodies, historical moments, and social identities while retaining some semblance of individual personhood, albeit one that is porous and fluid. Trapping this spectral trans-subject within a ghost story, Jackson stages the painful and oppressive interactions between the traumatized subject and the social world that attempts to defer, package, and expunge her experiences as an effort to retain the hegemony of the human.
Entering the Oleander Square: Trauma and Hauntology Before Hill House
Long before she enters Hill House's ghostly realm, Eleanor Vance lives a life haunted by private pain, unattainable social expectations, [End Page 55] and at least a single uncanny encounter that invites both supernatural and psychological explanations. Less than a month after her father's death, "showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason," attracting a crowd of "neighbors and sightseers who gathered daily outside the front door" (4). The event pulls together an affective experience of the quotidian with the supernatural resonances of the gothic, allowing Nell (and the reader) to engage reality as a set of narrative registers that contaminate one another with vexing uncertainties and precarious possibilities. Instead of presenting the rain of stones as either a paranormal manifestation of the Vance family's recently deceased patriarch or as the acts of vindictive neighbors or bored teenagers, Jackson frames our understanding of the event subjectively, through Nell's mother's "blind, hysterical insistence that all of this was due to malicious, backbiting people" (4). Such a rhetorical move constructs for the reader a strong sense of Nell's strange and uncertain cosmology in which the undisputed hatred of others might have supernatural effects, and any attempt to understand the unknown will be violently foreclosed by a mother's suspicious and misanthropic certainties.
Even though no single incident stands out as a definitive source of trauma, the entire sequence of events—Mr. Vance's death, the rain of stones, the people gathering around the house, Nell's mother's paranoid reactions, Nell's and her sister's temporary removal for the home—leaves Nell traumatized. The structure of the traumatic experience, from its psycho-social topography, has been well documented as an effort to understand "the reality of an unimaginable occurrence" (Felman and Laub 222). For Cathy Caruth, trauma is the disjunction between an event and the subject's ability to coordinate her experience of the event within subjective and cultural frameworks. The traumatic event "is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it" (193). While Caruth's conception of trauma is invaluable for studying Nell's experiences, it is also somewhat insufficient in that Nell is wounded by more than definitive events.
Nell resides at the intersection of three separate but interrelated categories of trauma that clarify and extend Caruth's framework: structural, punctual, and non-punctual. Dominick LaCapra theorizes structural trauma as the inherent trauma of being "trapped" within a system [End Page 56] of language, a fundamental "absence" in experience, a gap between what Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to as the living being and the speaking being (202). As a present lack in the subject, it is difficult to trace sensations of loss and disorientation back to structural trauma; thus, its symptoms are often confused with what Greg Forter explains as punctual and non-punctual trauma. For Forter, punctual trauma marks the clearly-identifiable historical occurrence that generates in the subject an "unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience" (259). Non-punctual trauma refers to forms of experience "that are more mundanely catastrophic … such traumas are also so chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as 'shocks'" (260). The effects of Nell's structural trauma intermingle with the punctual traumas of losing her father and being abused by her mother as well as the pervasive and persistent non-punctual trauma of experiencing "small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair" (Jackson 4). This field of traumatic experience unhinges Nell's reality from causality, intentionality, and meaning, and supplants them with distrust, anxiety, and resentment. Despite the overwhelming influence these traumas have on Nell's identity and sense of reality, they remain for her unnamed and beyond her scope of awareness, rendering her vulnerable, as well as highly sensitive to, and resentful of, the desires and demands of others.
Through her history of imbricated traumas, Nell offers access to the ghost's "life world," which, for Avery Gordon, is a spectral realm in which distinctions between actual and imaginary, past and present, and inside and outside become suspect (179). Until her mother's death, Nell lives in isolation and servitude; she is forbidden from developing social attachments, and even her inner sense of personhood is rigidly policed. These everyday wounds are animated by a fierce, pervasive hatred. A gothic perversion of the love fabled to tether together the nuclear family of the 1950s, Nell's hatred of others has been nurtured by the women in her life—her mother, he sister, her niece—and extends to the social category of "woman" itself. This non-punctual traumatizing circuit of hatred buoys the suspicious and anxious corners of Nell's personhood while blocking dimensions of curiosity and compassion, rendering her, at least partially, spectral. While Nell haunts her mother's home as a [End Page 57] dutiful ghost, she is in turn haunted by her sister's domestic life that, at least on the surface, provides all of the security promised by the nuclear family of the 1950s—a set of conditions that Nell lacked as a child and was, at least before Hill House, unable to pursue as an adult. As a ghostly consciousness, Nell cannot narrate her experiences, rendering her "reserved," "shy," "self-conscious," "awkward," and, perhaps most importantly, unable to "find words" (4). It is this final condition—wordlessness—that becomes crucial to understanding the novel's negotiation of trauma.
Without the opportunity to narrate her traumatic history, her almost debilitating feelings of loss and distress remain both nebulous and partially unknown. According to holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, it is not until the traumatized subject narrates her perception and reaction to her history that she comes to know its remainder and "experience" it more fully. The dynamic engagement between listener or "secondary witness" and the traumatized subject gives birth to the putative traumatic event. In this way, the first time the trauma is experienced is in its telling, but even then, the traumatized subject "testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its existence" (Felman and Laub 221). To engage elements of this absent event, Laub positions the listener as "one who comes to look for something that is nonexistent; a record that has yet to be made" (221). What she listens for is silence, moments of lost or disrupted discourse that dissolves "barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and place, of self and subjectivity" (222).
Left untold, "the story" of Nell's trauma "had been forgotten," developing in her an "underside of her life" (5), an austere sense of absence, loss, and uncanny potentiality. Her inability to narrate her traumatic experiences marks her as a paradoxical thing, both trapped in the realm of the unborn (a thing that never was) and yet somehow mourned (a thing that was but is now gone). Jackson critics tend to read this type of gendered dis-integration as a symptom of an unformed or immature ego. Angela Hague contends that Jackson's women are not prepared for adulthood and "begin to fragment and dissociate when forced to act independently" (76). In extending Hague's thesis, James Egan argues that Jackson's female characters grasp "desperately for the domestic tranquility absent from them or distorted in their lives, and [End Page 58] their yearning for sanctuary led them into … situations which proved to be open-ended, unpredictable, paradoxical, and illusory" (23). For both Hague and Egan, this inability to function without a safe, normal, domestic life is evidence of a decidedly critical outlook expressed in Jackson's work: her narratives trap characters inside worlds in which illusions expand rhizomatically, driving her characters to death, suicide, abdication of agency, and/or resignation to a cosmos of Kafkaesque entrapment. Jackson's employment of these gothic conventions move her subject away from traditional concepts of normative human subjectivity and test its ontological and epistemological limits.
Through Nell's transition from her life sleeping on her sister's couch to whatever it is that awaits her at Hill House, Jackson demonstrates the potential value of posthumanist models of subjectivity when attempting to work through the traumatic. Once liberated from the most immediate sources of non-punctual trauma (the oppressive, hate-fueled dynamics of her family and an alienating social realm that refuses to validate her pain), Nell is free to experiment with ways to manage and work through her trauma. For Nell, her "journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent" (13–14). While Holly Blackwood asserts that Eleanor is "entirely uncomfortable with being alone" (249), in the liminal space of her car, she is not only comfortable with being alone, but the experience inspires an almost manic, celebratory joy. Such independence empowers her to escape the painful limitations of humanist ontology and replaces them with what Jacques Derrida terms hauntology, a spectral reframing of ontology that denotes the human self as always already imbricated with unknowable otherness (10). Thus, Nell's personhood becomes not a static thing but a process of "being-with specters," a subjective movement that "can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost" (Derrida xvii-xviii). As Nell travels to Hill House, her hauntological or spectral subjectivity opens her to a type of vulnerability that allows her to access traces of her traumatic history that have previously remained obscured. Without a specific tale of trauma to tell (or a secondary witness to whom to tell it), Nell narrates to herself a series of semi-fictions and autobiographical sketches in which she is caster and victim of spells, witch and princess, marginalized female with transgressive agency and harmless, endangered ingénue who will end up either married or killed. Such meta-tales integrate materials from [End Page 59] her suppressed past with her present hopes and fears, performing Laub's intersubjective dynamic of narrating one's traumatic history intersubjectivity. Within the meta-narrative realm of her tales, she is author, character, and listener, or, in the language of trauma studies, she is traumatized subject, witness, and secondary witness.
While driving through a village, "she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps" (15). As trauma rescripts perceptions of time, the image of the house allows Nell to bring differing sites of reality together, simultaneously rewriting parts of her past and expressing hope for Hill House's promised future. She creates "a time that is strangely new and of itself" (15). While Nell's narrative of the house presents a remarkably uneventful but peaceful life, what makes the story uncanny is its point of view. The novel's third-person narrator steps aside, allowing Nell to ghost herself into a character that takes over the narrative through her first-person perspective. In the middle of a sentence, Nell's character of Nell interjects: "I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front" (15). In this new narrative voice, Nell, as an old woman, reflects back on a quiet solitary life in which "a little dainty old woman took care of" her (15). The introduction of this motherly apparition invites Nell to revisit and reimagine the potential sources of her wounds. As Roberta Rubenstein observes, in Jackson's fiction, "the mother's absence becomes a haunting presence that bears directly on the daughter's difficult struggle to achieve selfhood as well as to express her unacknowledged rage or her sense of precariousness in the world" (311). Thus, the dainty old woman manifests an idealized projection of Nell's mother as a nurturing presence, but within this uncanny house—part actual, part imagined—this mother figure also channels Nell's previous identity as caretaker. In this way, the old women in the tale create a spectral dynamic in which Nell can be both lady of the house, attended to by a matronly presence, and attentive caretaker who served her mother happily and dutifully. The fluid recasting of her punctual and non-punctual traumatic histories instills in Nell an unabated serenity that neither erases nor ignores her pain and anxiety but, rather, accommodates it by leaving her traumatized subjectivity free to operate beyond the boundaries of anthropocentric human identity. Uninhibited by ontological policing, Nell imagines an entire future that ends not with her death, but with an ellipsis: "When I died …" (15). This stylistic move ruptures [End Page 60] the narrative with white space, silence, the entrance of a ghost. Nell the story-teller, it seems, creates a hospitable space for Nell the character, allowing Nell to both narrate and listen to the story of her own death while simultaneously entering that dying consciousness from the point of view of a ghost from the future.
As part specter, Nell leaves her fictional life of domestic tranquility and continues on the road until she encounters a magical square of oleander inside which "there was nothing, no house, no building" (19). Unlike her life in the house with the stone lions, the oleander square is empty of the rooted, the stable, the preformed. There is no space in which the echoes of her mother, whether psychological projection or spectral presence, can return, haunt, or influence. Within the oleander square, no previous patterns of control or authority exist, nor any familial history. The single most powerful factor in her life—the domestic sphere—is here a present non-presence. The moment depicts Nell's desire to be free from the traditional domestic sphere of the house and its traumatic abuses as well as her need for an alternative mode of subjective identification and a confrontation with her structural trauma—the absence at her putative core. Crucially, Nell understands this traumatizing gap at the heart of the human as both a site of loss and deprived possibility: "Now what was here, she wondered, what was here and is gone, or what was going to be here and never came?" (19). She evinces a capacity to grapple with the possibility that her identity, and all of the subjective positions she inhabits, are in fact little more than fictions. Far from crippling Nell or causing further pain, she employs this knowledge to promote an understanding that personhood is a momentary, fluid construction of random alien materials. Ghosting herself in this way empowers her to invoke resonances of her traumatic history without succumbing to pain, guilt, or psychic disintegration. Here, the spectral subject intuitively engages the past to transforms the present in a set of creative acts that blur memory, imagination, and the material world.
In this space defined by what Donna Haraway thinks of as "world-making, ontological play" (88), Nell begins working through her trauma, a process she advances when engaging an obstinate but courageous young girl in a country diner. The girl offers Nell what no other person up until this point in the novel has: acceptance, kindness, recognition, and that simple social nicety—a smile—creating for Nell a social space in which [End Page 61] to test her newly liberated subjective possibilities. The episode that follows constructs a mini-war of wills between the control of a mother and the potentially petty but efficacious resistance of the child. Metaphorically, this battle functions as both an analogue of Nell's previous life of servitude as well as a way to fight for a space within culture to exist as a traumatized subject. The girl refuses to drink milk out of anything other than her cup of stars, which enables her to "see the stars while she drinks her milk" (21). The girl insists on the ability to link the experience of witnessing a vast, non-human world to the imperative ritual of drinking one's milk. Nell quickly picks up on the conflict and what is at stake in it: "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" (22). The cup of stars becomes a final talisman for Nell, along with the stone lions and the oleander square, a sign of her ability to ghost herself and engage with her past, the material world, and her imagination in an effort to mourn her losses and cope with her trauma, even while in public.
Sadly, there are no cups of stars in Hill House, no stone lions or squares of oleander. Once Nell leaves the expansive openness of the road and arrives at a clear destination, she enters a narrative archive in which the potential of her spectral subjectivity to help her manage her trauma becomes muted and impotent. On the road, Nell ghosts herself and narrates freely. Once she reaches a house, an organizational pattern, a structured space in which she must fit and conform, Nell unwittingly exchanges the road for a locked gate (with a gatekeeper) and the firm immovability of Hill House.
"Swallowed Whole by a Monster": Spectral Subjectivity and the Ghost Story
Overseen by Dr. Montague, Hill House stands as an archive of ghost stories—an asynchronous collection of tales in which the histories of both the living and the dead are narrated, revised, and ultimately exploited by Dr. Montague's analytical and editorial agency. Whereas Bernice M. Murphy localizes the patriarchal power of Hill House in its architect Hugh Crain, insinuating that Montague is just an echo of Crain's corrupted authority (142–43), I contend that Montague is the greater threat to the vulnerable subjects under his purview. Certainly, he is not to be trusted, by either characters or readers. He contrives his [End Page 62] guests' entrances into Hill House in such a manner as to inspire maximum anxiety, tension, and, not coincidentally, inebriation. He claims that he knows little more about Hill House than his guests, that he "'had not decided … how best to prepare [them] for Hill House'" (68), and that he will not "'put a name to what has no name'" (67), yet, he clearly possesses a wealth of knowledge about Hill House's history; he offers a highly-detailed narrative of Hill House's previous occupants, complete with analyses and commentary; and he states conclusively that "'the house is evil'" (75). Such an interpretive framework, that professes ignorance and openness but evinces knowledge and authority, offers his guests (and readers) the illusion of freedom to analyze, interpret, and narrate their own stories, but in actuality, he only allows them only the power to reiterate (and relive) the stories he feeds them.
Whether by happenstance or design, Montague's collection of tales replicates Nell's private history of abuse and trauma. It features domineering parents, a litany of submissive wives, sisterly rivalries, hints of homosexual romance, implications of attempted thievery, and a host of explanations that attempt to rationalize the seemingly marvelous events experienced in the house. The "real life" characters who serve as inspiration of Montague's chronicle of Hill House—Hugh Crain, his three wives, his two daughters, the eldest daughter's companion, the unnamed person who dies while trying to escape Hill House eighteen years ago—are now removed from history and resituated as semi-fictional characters who live and die within the boundaries of Montague's sensationalized stories of horror and delight. Thus, Montague is guilty of participating in a process Eric Santner terms narrative fetishism: "the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being in the first place" (214). While these ghost stories may appear to offer access to the traumas experienced by Hill House's previous inhabitants, they also function as master narratives, ways to manage the raw, chaotic, unknowable traumatic energies that operate beyond codified social roles and present them as easily consumable entertainment. It is Montague's narratives, not the events themselves, that have authority.
The threat Montague's collection poses to Nell's hauntological subjectivity is rooted in its ability to categorize and explain away her traumatic history, reducing her multivalent spectral subjectivity [End Page 63] and silencing her narrative voice. Montague's explanatory framework imprisons Nell in an organizational pattern, a structured space in which she must either conform or be expunged. Soon after entering Hill House, Nell recognizes the position she is in: "'I'm sure I've been here before,' Eleanor said. 'In a book'" (47). Within this "book" of ghostly tales, Nell feels like "a small creature swallowed whole by a monster … and the monster feels [her] tiny little movements inside" (37). She still exists, but within the pages of this book, her hauntological expansiveness which helped her to access her own trauma, is limited and translated. Instead of allowing a space in which Nell may narrate her self-mythologies, Montague's tales prohibit her from working through her traumatic experience by compelling her to repress her pain and function under the rubric of the discrete humanist subject and its traditional social roles.
Montague's analysis of the threat of the spectral can be understood as a type of victim blaming: "'No physical danger exists,' the doctor said positively. 'No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage is done by the victim to himself. One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable" (130). Within Montague's rubric, the mind might be trained or manipulated, but it cannot be violated. Such a humanist set of assumptions can be devastating to a traumatized subject like Nell in that it enforces a notion of healthy human identity that excludes traumatic experience, which is defined by the very psychological ruptures that Montague dismisses. If, as Gordon sees it, haunting is a state in which "repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known … when what's been in your blind spot comes into view" (xvi), then Montague's anxiety that haunting can over-excite the imagination of the fragile subject and inspire her to damage herself becomes decidedly denigrating and treacherous.
Gordon insists that ghost "cannot be simply tracked back to an individual loss or trauma" (183). Rather, ghosts arrive precisely when we, as individuals or communities, oppress or deny a happening, which forces us to experience a moment "when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different than before, seems like it must be done" (xvi). With [End Page 64] Gordon's ethical framework in mind, Montague's explanatory footnotes that frame his master narratives of ghosts and haunting beneath such a remarkably limited vision of the human subject becomes a mode of cultural and historical denial—its own form of traumatizing behavior in which the ethical authority of the ghost to reveal or antagonize the status quo becomes coded as an ontological affront to the human and a danger to ostensible mental stability.
Highly sensitive to thoughts and behaviors that might single her out for mockery or ridicule, Nell internalizes Montague's humanist rubric and rewrites her narratives, translating her hauntological totems as domestic decorations. Instead of channeling Nell to a realm of spectral openness, they now become markers of a limited human identity that, she hopes, will be accepted as normal—maybe even charming—by Theo and the rest of the humans of Hill House. Describing a fictional apartment to Theo, Nell remarks that "'I had to look for weeks before I found my little stone lions on each corner of the mantel … once I had a blue cup of stars painted on the inside; when you looked down into a cup of tea it was full of stars. I want a cup like that'" (81). Nell's gambit works. Theo plays along with Nell's game, replacing the hauntological connection with the girl in the country diner to a homosocial, possibly homosexual, connection with her. She tells Nell that maybe someday she will find such a cup in her shop and will send it to Nell as a token of love and friendship. Thus, the cup becomes a mobile signifier, emblematizing Nell's shift from hauntological subject to normal person, a subject who thinks, shapes, and performs a mode of identity that will garner for her the type of social safety she seeks.
The novel's first overt scene of conventional haunting—an aggressive series of knocks on Theo's bedroom door in the middle of the night—highlights the damaging effects of Nell's quest to replace hauntology with human ontology via establish social bonds. Initially, the crashing noise returns Nell to her life of non-punctual trauma. She wakes up not in Hill House, but in her mother's house, in a time when her mother was alive, and Nell lived in a constant state of post traumatic attention. Before she is fully awake, she replies to the specter in the hall: "'Coming, Mother, coming'" (118). More than semi-somnambulistic confusion or simple morning grogginess, Nell's comment, especially her repetition of "coming," denotes a consciousness that exists in multiple places, in multiple eras. While she soon realizes that [End Page 65] she has awoken in Hill House and that it was Theo who called out to her, she still carries with her her unattended pain, frustration, resentment, and resignation of sacrificing her adult life to her mother's care, bringing with her the ghost of her mother into the room and, at least partially, grafting that oppressive presence onto Theo. Not only does the moment bring to the surface these unresolved feelings, but it also resonates with Nell's profound sense of hitherto undisclosed guilt for possibly murdering (through neglect or intention) her mother. These traumatic reverberations result from Nell's awareness of the knocking in the hall, but the scene involves more than just riotous sound: accompanying the cacophony is "a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh" (122–23). Of course, the child's ghostly voice intimates the presence of the young psychologically abused Crain sisters, but it also invokes the child version of Nell who once lived through a paranormal episode of stones raining on her house as well as the rebellious girl in the country diner who refused to drink without her cup of stars.
Instead of engaging these painful valences and continuing a process of working-through, Nell exploits the encounter to construct a moment of interpersonal connection. Nell and Theo end up clutching each other, seeking some sense of solace from their terror: "'It had found them." Eleanor said aloud, 'Now I know why people scream, because I think I'm going to,' and Theodora said, 'I will if you will,' and laughed, so that Eleanor turned quickly back to the bed and they held each other, listening in silence" (122). They keep the ghost, and whatever realities to which it offers access, safely locked on the other side of the door and focus instead on each other's behavior. Here, the ability for the spectral subject to begin to work through becomes hindered by the desire to be human, which is to say, to establish human connection as conscripted beneath the rubric of traditional sociality. As Tricia Lootens notes, Hill House "entraps its inhabitants with fantasies of domestic bliss even as it forces them to recognize such fantasies as delusions" (155). Nell's fantasy of kinship with Theo works to defer Nell's trauma and ignore her wounds, eschewing her spectral subjectivity for a momentary social connection. Through Nell's paranoid filter, this simple interaction becomes an extraordinary act of friendship, acceptance, and even romantic love. Perhaps more importantly, it is a self-affirming act: Theo's embrace gives Nell at least a temporary sense of discrete human identity. Despite their earlier invocation of the house's past inhabitants, neither Nell [End Page 66] nor Theo consider that their feelings of connectivity may be inspired by traces of Montague's stories about Crain's daughters or the homo-social (potentially homoerotic) relationship between the elder Crain daughter and her "companion," leaving those trace energies present but "unheard." Instead, they use the narratives of which they are a part to participate in a process of "undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness" (Santner 214).
The next spectral encounter—"HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" written in chalk on the wall—ruptures the social fantasy that Nell has constructed, demonstrating the fragility of her social human identity Nell has constructed (136). The possibilities of what actually took place are impossible to determine. Nell could have written the note to herself, any of the other members of the party could have written the note as an "official" part of Montague's experiment or as a cruel joke, or any number of ghosts could have written it—to name only a few possibilities. The effect of this hesitation is that it threatens any certainty that either Nell or the reader has in regard to what might be real or trusted and heightens a sense of group paranoia and distrust. Richard Pascal notes, the ghosts of Hill House attempt to "impose their personal fantasies and demands upon the communal domain" (465). The all-too-human entities in the house do the same. The difference between the spectral and the human in this regard is that the communal field of the ostensible humans is constructed in part by the very desire to expunge the traumatic, ignore the sources of the spectral, and code that which operates beyond the traditionally understood framework of the human as silly, crazy, unreal, and thus, not worthy of serious concern.
Nell attempts to use her new social connections to locate secondary witnesses to whom she can narrate her impossible histories and work through. For Dominick LaCapra, working-through is not an individual process of healing but a cultural project that necessitates a "speculative dimension" on the behalf of the listener or reader of the traumatic narrative: "Responsive understanding has an affective dimension involving the problem of empathy or compassion in a sense not equated with identification […] but rather requiring the affirmation of the "other" as in significant ways 'other'" (8, 25). To work through is to leave the comforts of the known and excepted and enter into LaCapra's speculative dimension in which one may be disturbed or unsettled and the ontological category of the human can be, at least suspended, if not [End Page 67] abolished, leaving the space for the traumatized subject to be substantially other. Instead of understanding or listening, she is met with judgement, suspicion, and derision.
Without a social dynamic that accepts her pained subjectivity and facilitates a communal sense of working-through, Nell becomes hurt and rejected, and she translates her pain into fuel for abuse. As a rejection of the social world that refuses to engage her trauma, Nell acts out, channeling both her own traumatic past and the melancholic pain of those ghosts now packaged in the narratives of Hill House's history. Mirroring the incessant repetitions of traumatic memory, Jackson replays the writing on the wall scene, but this time in the private space of Theo's room. Instead of chalk, the message is written in red (blood? paint? nail polish?) and is accompanied by the discovery of Theo's torn and destroyed clothes. Crucially, Nell not only suspects herself of having performed these acts, but she also considers the possibility that she did so while possessed by some ghostly intrusion. In a moment that brings to mind Nell's engagement with her trauma in the square of oleander, she questions herself openly: "is it possible that I am not quite coherent at this moment?" (145). By questioning her coherence, Nell confronts the possibility that her human identity is little more than a fantasy. However, instead of offering her a sense of liberation from oppressive social confines, as it does in the oleander square, this engagement with her trauma becomes a horrifying threat to her unitary human subjectivity through which her social bonds have been forged.
In a final effort to narrate some part of her traumatic history, Nell confesses to Theo and Luke: "'It was my fault my mother died'" (199). Instead of responding with any sense of care or even curiosity, the pair channel American culture's desire to avoid pain and defer the traumatic. Theo chides Nell for trying to engage her painful past, telling her that she "'should have forgotten all that'" (200). Perhaps even more hurtful, Luke reads Nell's vulnerability as a fanciful narrative that exemplifies her own sense of importance, claiming that Nell "'probably just like[s] thinking'" it was her fault (200). Perhaps because of their own immaturities, Theo and Luke only seem to be able to read Nell as "an anarchically inclined child" who desires to "exploit the privileges of adulthood in pursuit of juvenile license" (Pascal 481).
Such refusal to take seriously the pain of others is compounded by the rhetoric of perfect love espoused by Mrs. Montague late in the novel. On the surface, Mrs. Montague purports to offer a social sense of [End Page 68] empathetic engagement that LaCapra insists is necessary for the traumatized subject to work through. She reads ghosts as traumatized personas who need help and care, critiquing the others in the house for being hard-hearted against the pain of others: "'The spirits dwelling in this house may be actually suffering because they are aware that you are afraid of them'" (172). Perhaps more significantly, she states in simple terms what is at stake in the novel, that "'the beings in this house are only waiting for an opportunity to tell their stories and free themselves from the burden of their sorrows'" (183). Of course, for Mrs. Montague, the public presentation of such ethical attentiveness is merely an act; when Nell's unresolved trauma causes her to act out in violent and immature ways, Mrs. Montague's purported compassion becomes profound annoyance at what she calls "'childish nonsense'" (223). Despite its ostensible interest in the spectral, the social field constructed by Hill House's human guests excludes the traumatized subject.
Unable to cope with her traumatic past by narrating to a secondary witness, and on the verge of losing her subjectifying interactions with the human inhabitants of Hill House, Nell acts out with increasing bouts of frustration and rage, entertaining violent fantasies toward Theo: "I would like to hit her with a stick. … I would like to batter her with rocks. … I hate her. … I would like to watch her dying" (148). For similar reasons, she dismisses Luke entirely: "Does he think that a human gesture of affection might seduce me?" (156). Since Nell displaced her hauntological totems as social metaphors to construct a relationship with Theo, her sense of personhood is contingent upon Theo's acceptance of her. Once Theo rejects Nell, even if momentarily, Nell's entire sense of identity crumbles as do the psychic pathways she previously constructed to her impossible histories. Cruelly, Theo employs the images of the cup of stars and the stone lions, the very totems that Nell recoded to avoid mockery and ridicule, as social weapons. Responding to Nell's awkward and failed flirtatious experiment with Luke, Theo teases, "'Will you have him at your little apartment, Nell, and offer him to drink from your cup of stars?'" (161–62). The interaction devastates Nell, closing her off from both the narrativizing power of the road and the social deferment of her trauma that at least kept at bay the jagged edges of traumatic memories and gaps.
Within the ghostly archive of Hill House, under the tutelage of Montague, Nell's spectral subjectivity becomes controlled, reconstituted as first domestic decoration and second as the broken remnants [End Page 69] of a once beautiful home. Hill House's surroundings seem to hold the ruins of her early hauntological totems—the oleander square, the stone lions, the blue cup of stars—as if to suggest both the destruction of such modes of subjectivity as well as the House's ability to subsume and repackage the identity of its guests: "as they ran across the garden there was nothing except weeds …, bushes where there had been flowers …, half-buried stones and what might have been a broken cup" (166). Her magical flowers turn to weeds, her lions decay to half-buried stones, her cup of stars to trash—the spectral present non-presence of Nell's previous dream and authority are thrown aside and barely noticed as part of the landscape, representing aptly Nell's state within the House. After a while, she "can't picture any world but Hill House" (141). As Kali Tal clarifies, the narratives trauma victims employ in order to distance themselves from trauma become complicit in "strategies of cultural coping—mythologization, medicalization, and disappearance." Once translated into a "set of symbols," the safe, packaged narrative of trauma "gradually replaces" the reality of trauma (6). Hill House and Montague's packaging of its spectral history subsume Nell's spectral subjectivity, relegating her trauma as nothing more than a part of a larger collection of tales. The talismanic objects that offered her such imaginative power and agency earlier in the novel are here nothing more than symbols in someone else's story.
Reckoning with Rabbits: Reestablishing Human Borders and Quarantining Trauma
Rejected by the social, Nell activates the remnants of her hauntological subjectivity to be-with the non-human elements of Hill House. Instead of communicating with Theo and Luke, for example, she heightens her awareness of the trees and wild flowers, which "turned toward her with attention, as though dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile" (168). Whereas on the road, Nell incorporates the natural landscape into her fantasies, turning copses of trees into haunted forests, here, as an ostensible human, she sees herself from a tree's point of view, which pities her mobility. The very thing that Nell desired—freedom to be and move and narrate for herself—has become a condition to be lamented, and her need to narrate departs. Left without a [End Page 70] place in the social sphere, Nell offers to Hill House the ostensibly human valence of her being: "I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all" (192). After her ritual of abdication, Nell experiences an extreme attentiveness to the house and its surroundings, but from a non-human, radically un-subjective narrative voice, without identity or desire. Jackson describes Nell's state without a sense of identity or a narrative to tell.
Eleanor sat, looking down at her hands, and listened to the sounds of the house. Somewhere upstairs a door swung quietly shut; a bird touched the tower briefly and flew off. In the kitchen the stove was settling and cooling, with little soft creakings. An animal—a rabbit?—moved through the bushes by the summerhouse. She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attic, the wood aging.
(211)
Nell, erased from the category of the human, perceives the world through a profoundly non-anthropocentric optic. In an effort to obliterate, at least imaginarily, her pain, her history, her untold traumas, she submits to a subjective state in which the borders of personhood are removed.
When tracing the life of an animal, the vague and tenuous suggestion of a rabbit leaps into Nell's non-human vision of the world. Throughout the novel, "rabbit" has been a kind of shibboleth employed by Nell, Theo, and Luke. Minutes after meeting one another, Nell and Theo are disturbed by "something unseen" (48) in the landscape surrounding Hill House. In an effort to subdue their fear and establish a sense of normalcy, they joke that they saw a rabbit. After relaying this story to Luke, he assists them in their need to convert the marvelous to the mundane, using the moment to flirt: "'I go in mortal terror of rabbits'" (51). Here, the spectral is not denied; but rather affirmed. By playing along with the unambiguous game of using normal social behavior to quell feeling of unease, Luke solidifies the reality of the spectral by normalizing an anthropocentric process of belittling that which threatens the traditional boundaries of human sociality, which is to say, the trauma of others. From the perspective of Nell's spectral reality, the memory of the rabbit is a haunting reminder of the human, a paradigmatic symbol of her social connections with Theo and Luke. [End Page 71] The sequence illustrates how Jackson inverts the reality matrix at the end of the novel, allowing the life world of the ghost to usurp narrative and epistemological control, if only momentarily. However, unlike Nell's spectral states experienced on her journey to Hill House, which privilege a fluid sense of subjectivity open to transformations and becomings, Nell's spectral subjectivity while at Hill House is foreclosed, quarantined from the human world. Instead of being an access point to her traumatic past, the spectral becomes for Nell a realm fully suppressed. Thus, she is forced to shore up the boundaries of her subjectivity and bifurcate herself into human and spectral halves, terminating the potential power of the ghost to work through trauma.
Part of what possesses (and possibly murders) Nell in the novel's final scene is the managed presentation of the traumas of others. Instead of having the affective dimensions of gothic potentiality play out and empower Nell to reckon with her posthumanist personhood, Jackson reveals that, to the characters in her storyworld, the gothic is a closed-off caricature of itself, an empty pastiche, a mode of filtering and blunting subjective possibilities. Nell's voice is subsumed and controlled by Montague's analytical apparatus. Nell and her need to narrate her traumatic history are replaced by a field of narratives that function as part of a dominating matrix of similar but foreclosed narratives. Montague's collection serves as a feedback loop between the specter and the human that erases the crucial, intuitive narrative expressions of the traumatized subject and asserts in their place a homogenized universe of limited and prefabricated human destinies. Here, Nell's hauntological totems, which once held within them a vibrant universe of power and possibility, become nothing more than simple symbols inscribed in a hermetically closed text and explained away in a footnote.
Tony M. Vinci is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University-Chillicothe and author of Ghost, Android, Animal: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human (forthcoming, Routledge). His recent publications examine how posthumanist theories of ethics and subjectivity necessarily reframe our understanding of the traumatic, especially as narrated in the literature and film of the fantastic.
Notes
1. Within the rubric of the female gothic, Eleanor's idiosyncratic history becomes another generalized inscription of a "socially marginalized wom[a]n" (Anderson 199), the multivalent environment in which she is imbricated become a single "world in which no space is secure and the supports of identity collapse" (Bonikowski 67), her abcanny subjectivity becomes a sign of her "delusional character" (Hattenhauer 155), her ontological exploration becomes evidence of "mental illness" (Hague 74), and her essentialized "madness" becomes "a political event stemming from female oppression in a male-dominated culture" (Parks 16).
2. It might appear reckless to position Jackson, a mid-century author, within such a seemingly contemporaneous category as critical posthumanist, but the very field of critical posthumanism works against the vision of the posthuman as a contemporary cultural phenomenon inspired by science fictional visions of technologically-enhanced versions of the human subject. For example, Mathew A. Taylor maps a history of posthumanist experimentation in canonical American literature, arguing that "posthumanism is best understood as a broader, transhistorical attempt to integrate the human into larger networks of being" (5). In Taylor's work, American authors on the margins—from Edgar Allen Poe to Zora Neale Hurston—have always already been posthumanist.
3. While Jackson's work addresses the popular psychological codifications utilized in the 1950s and 60s, she often does so in an effort to interrogate conceptions of "mental illness" and experiment with subjectivities that operate outside the pointedly hegemonic boundaries of sanity and madness (which tend to reify the very power structures they seek to disrupt).
4. Derrida rereads the ghost of Hamlet's father as an ethical injunction for the present, compelling us to expand our sense of ethics to include a reckoning with "the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead" (xviii). While much of the book grapples with the spectrality of global politics, its opening chapters on this expansive vision of ethics and ghosts have become foundational for scholars of spectrality, ethics, and the posthumanities.
5. As del Pilar Blanco and Peeren clarify, "spectrality is deeply embedded within the discourse of loss, mourning, and recovery," marking trauma and trauma studies as structurally imbricated with iterations of the ghost (11).
