Felicia McDonnell’s Reviews > The Haunting of Hill House > Status Update

John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is mentioned during a pivotal scene in Chapter 6 to highlight the theme of religious terror, parental control, and psychological manipulation

the characters' conversation about fear serves as a profound psychological mirror that exposes their core vulnerabilities, establishes their defenses, and foreshadows Eleanor’s tragic fate.
The primary significance of this scene lies in the contrast between the group's intellectualized, abstract fear and Eleanor's raw, deeply personal isolation.

Journeys end in lovers meeting,” from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, is repeated throughout. That Eleanor first recalls it as she walks up the steps toward HH just as she is thinking that the house “was waiting for her, evil, but patient” is significant. Eleanor finds no “lover” at HH, nor a “cup of stars”; instead, she comes full circle, symbolically returning to the mother she’d escaped

Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison are read by Dr. M. Jackson chose these specific Samuel Richardson novels for thematic reasons: 1. Captivity. All of Richardson’s novels are claustrophobic and long. Pamela and Clarissa revolve around powerful men who entrap, isolate, and psychologically abuse vulnerable women. This mirrors the plot of HH-the mansion is the captor, isolating and entrapping fragile Eleanor

Throughout the novel, there are signs that Theodora is attracted to Eleanor. Her relationship with her roommate, whose sex is never revealed, is ambiguous. Theodora pauses, then laughs when Eleanor asks if she is married. This becomes more significant as their relationship grows increasingly tense.

Eleanor’s childlike qualities. Her thoughts meander, and she drifts into non sequiturs. Her fixation on her identity is an ominous sign that her grip on this identity is tenuous. Eleanor says she has an apartment w stone lions and she used to have a cup of stars. her incorporating objects she saw on the drive to Hill House into her description of her non-existent apartment indicates her disconnect from reality.

Jackson establishes Eleanor as a woman who has never been her own person, and who goes to Hill House seeking not only the supernatural but also herself. Hill House, which seems “awake,” almost as if it “seemed somehow to have formed itself” is arguably a character in its own right. Jackson frequently describes the house using human characteristics

As Eleanor drives to Hill House and imagines herself living in all of these different homes and what she would do there, I can absolutely relate. I do this myself-imagining different lives.

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.”(Chapter 1 - Page 15)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed the first paragraph of the novel, the narrator states that absolute reality is not a tenable state for any sane being and that Hill House is “not sane” (1), suggesting that Hill House represents, somehow, “absolute reality.”