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Haunted Women: Time, Memory, and Gender in Women’s Gothic Novels
by
Kennedy K. McLeod, BA
A Thesis
In
English
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved
Dr. Marta Kvande, Ph.D.
Chair of the Committee
Dr. Cordelia Barrera, Ph.D.
Mark Sheridan, Ph.D.
Dean of the Graduate School
May, 2023
Copyright 2023, Kennedy K. McLeod
Texas Tech University, Kennedy McLeod, May 2023
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
Women, the Gothic, and Time .................................................................................................. 2
Haunting and Memory .............................................................................................................. 4
II. JE REVIENS: THE GHOSTS OF MEMORY IN DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S
REBECCA ........................................................................................................................ 11
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 11
Memory in Conflict: The Social Life of Memory in Rebecca .............................................. 13
Rebecca’s Possession ................................................................................................................ 20
Haunted Relationships Among Women ................................................................................. 24
Burning Manderley .................................................................................................................. 26
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 29
III. ‘PERHAPS IT WILL NOT LET US GO’: MATERNAL HAUNTING IN
SHIRLEY JACKSON’S THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE .................................. 31
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 31
The Women of Hill House ................................................................................................................. 32
The History of Hill House ........................................................................................................ 33
A House Built Wrong ......................................................................................................................... 35
The Crain Family ............................................................................................................................... 38
Mothering in the Haunted Space & Female Relationships in Hill House ........................... 41
Hill House as Mother ......................................................................................................................... 43
Circular Structures .................................................................................................................. 49
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 50
III. IN MEMORIAM: CONFRONTING THE GHOSTS OF EXPLOITATION IN
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA’S MEXICAN GOTHIC ................................................. 52
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 52
What is Haunting High Place? ................................................................................................ 55
The First Wife ..................................................................................................................................... 58
Agnes ................................................................................................................................................... 60
Ruth ..................................................................................................................................................... 62
Memory & Community ........................................................................................................... 64
The Burning House & Lessons from the Past ....................................................................... 68
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 72
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic has concerned itself
with time and memory. Within the Gothic genre, and more specifically, the literary
hauntings found within it, the themes of time and memory are recurring. The return of the
past and its continued impact on the present shapes the Gothic narrative by its very
nature. Named, in part, for the architectural style popularized in the Middle Ages, the
nostalgic settings of the Gothic novel invoke the past, bringing it into the present. Even as
the Gothic settings transitioned from ruined castles to the more familiar modern houses
and estates, the settings of these novels continue to call upon the past with their rich
ancestral histories. Because of their intentional invocation of the past, the Gothic home
may be considered a site of memory—a place where our sense of the past, present, and
future converge.
In addition to the evolution of the Gothic’s setting, the genre's development over
time also brought forth the popularization of the ghost story. Leslie Fielder describes the
Gothic’s ghosts as “pale symbols (parodies of the immortal soul in which men had begun
to lose faith) of what persists after death” and explains that “in the eighteenth century, the
experience of rationalism had but made it easier to believe that a noxious influence, an
after-image which chilled the blood, outlasted physical decay, than that some integrating
principle of good eternally survived” (112). As Fielder suggests, this interest in what
becomes of life after death has long been a question in literature. The Gothic’s answer to
this is the ghost story, which allows for the exploration of these “after-image[s],”
considering not only the possibility of the immortal soul but also the potential for what
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remains to be changed in death (112). The Gothic ghost story, like the Gothic setting,
further speaks to the Gothic’s preoccupation with time and memory. The imagination of
life after death places the past in the present and concerns itself with a collective
remembering of what has come before us that also carries itself into the future.
Though these themes are commonplace in the Gothic, particularly in the ghost
story, a feminist reading of time, memory, and haunting in women throughout women’s
gothic novels is largely absent from current scholarship. The primary goal of “Haunted
Women” is to bridge this gap in scholarship through a discussion of literary haunting in
women’s gothic novels, which weaves together issues of time, memory, and gender,
speaking to the unique experiences and preoccupations of women in the patriarchal
haunted house. Drawing from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Shirley Jackson’s
The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020),
“Haunted Women” works toward an understanding of how time and memory operate in
women’s gothic novels, revealing how haunting acts as both a method of communing
with women of the past, present, and future and grants women autonomy under
patriarchal power structures.
Women, the Gothic, and Time
Women writers’ engagement with the literary supernatural is a longstanding
tradition. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this engagement was notable within
the Gothic romance, as popularized by women writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Clara
Reeve, and Elizabeth Gaskell. In the last hundred years, women have continued to turn to
the Gothic mode, utilizing the genre— like their predecessors— to explore cultural
anxieties surrounding the domestic sphere and their place within it. The term “literary
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supernatural” has broad potential and presents an opportunity to explore a wealth of
fiction concerning itself with phenomena that would be described as unusual or even
impossible by Western society. Narrowing our focus to the realm of the literary
supernatural that concerns itself with haunting— ghosts, specters, and the sins of the past
visited upon the present— one finds that women’s Gothic novels are often concerned
with the haunted house. These homes are not only haunted by the supernatural but also by
the past. As Diana Wallace notes, “the Female Gothic
1
is, of course, always concerned
with ‘history’, even when it is set in the present, because it is obsessed with a past which
keeps returning, just as Rebecca’s boat – Je Reviens – resurfaces” (134). The return of the
past in the Gothic novel demonstrates a circular way of thinking about time—the past
always returns to the present. For women authors in particular, this way of thinking about
time goes beyond the conventions of the Gothic mode. The concern with circular time
and return of the past that is central to the Gothic allows women to explore the
possibilities of understanding the world beyond linear conceptions of time. Feminist
scholar Brydie Kosmina argues that this freedom of exploration as it relates to writing
about the past is particularly important to women, noting that:
History is not the past itself, but rather is a narrative of that time, and feminist
revisionist and recuperative scholarship reflects an explicitly political feminist
intervention in these narratives of the past. Feminist historical work is
1
There is no consensus among literary scholars when it comes to the term “female gothic.” Initially coined
by Ellen Moers in 1976, the term “female gothic” has generally been used to describe a category of gothic
fiction relating to women, though, as Ellen Ledoux has argued, scholars have defined this relationship in
many ways, suggesting that the female gothic may refer to gothic fiction written by women, fiction which
employs the gothic mode in a particular way (including the “supernatural explained”), or may even refer to
the audience of the text. Given the lack of stasis on how scholars have chosen to employ this term in their
work, I have chosen to forgo its usage in my discussion. However, many scholars mentioned in these
chapters have elected to adopt the term in various ways to describe the novels under discussion.
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underpinned by a recognition that prior narratives of the past have excluded
marginalized identities, stories, and agency, and must therefore be embellished, or
even rewritten entirely, for those groups to access the past at all. (903)
Haunting’s prevalence in women’s Gothic novels is tied to this need to “embell[ish], or
even rewri[te]” the “prior narratives of the past” that the women have been excluded
from. Indeed, haunting offers a new way of imagining the past, showing how the past,
present, and future intertwine. The necessity of reimagining past narratives allows
women to break from linear conceptions of time to document and explore their own
history. Thus, haunting becomes an essential tool for writing and understanding women’s
relationships to time and memory, using these recurring themes “to explore their
connection to the past from within the present, particularly given the patriarchal status of
history and the exclusion of women from recorded pasts” (Kosmina 906). Therefore,
women’s ghost stories are not merely chilling explorations of the afterlife and collective
memory but also new ways of understanding and conceptualizing women’s relationship
to the past, present, and future.
Haunting and Memory
Though the various renderings of haunting across history and culture may allow
us to imagine haunting in many ways, literary haunting may be understood largely as the
return of the past. In an interview with Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, Avery
Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, states:
“haunting is an emergent state: the ghost arises, carrying the signs and portents of a
repression in the past or the present that’s no longer working. The ghost demands your
attention. The present wavers. Something will happen” (“Revolutionary Feminisms…”).
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Gordon’s work in Ghostly Matters presents us with our framework for understanding
haunting, its causes, and its purposes in literary narratives. Gordon’s suggestion that
haunting occurs in response to the repression of the past—or forgetting, one might say—
allows us to think of haunting as existing in relation to both time and memory. However,
the purpose of haunting is not simply to force a remembrance of the past but also to
interfere with the present and force us to respond to that interference. Thus, time and
memory are bound to one another within these narratives. Haunting demands that we
confront the ghosts of our past, both the literal and metaphorical things that haunt us, in
order to reshape the future.
Furthermore, Gordon’s research challenges us to think of memory as something
outside of ourselves, suggesting that memory may be thought of in a social context.
Using a photograph as a metaphor for understanding our memories of the past, Gordon
argues that:
The picture of the place is not personal memory as we conventionally understand
it, private, interior, mine to hoard or share, remember or forget. The picture of the
place is its very sociality, all the doings, happenings, and knowing that make the
social world alive in and around us as we make it ours. It is still out there because
social relations as such are not ours for the owning. They are prepared in advance
and they linger well beyond our individual time, creating that shadowy basis for
the production of material life. (166)
Essentially, Gordon indicates that the things that exist in our memory do not exist in our
memory alone. They exist outside of us as interpersonal social constructions—a
collective memory that encompasses all things and can take on a life of its own because
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of this sociality. Because of this, the past is ever-present and inescapable. The exploration
of memory’s sociality has also been conceived as rememory, a concept found in Toni
Morrison’s 1987 Gothic novel, Beloved. Morrison’s novel, set in the post-civil war
American south, follows the formerly enslaved Sethe and her daughter, Denver, whose
home is haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence and later inhabited by Beloved, a
young woman who appears, seemingly, out of nowhere and is suggested to be Sethe’s
deceased daughter. In the novel, Morrison explores the idea of memory through Sethe,
who explains:
It’s so hard for me to believe in [time]. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just
stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget.
Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house
burns down, its gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my
rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating
around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the
picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it
happened. (43)
For Sethe, time and memory are often in conflict. Sethe describes time as something
which “[passes] on,” implying that she considers time to be linear and always moving
forward. However, a linear conception of time contradicts her experience of rememory,
which seems to exist beyond the constraints of linear time and, potentially, even in
another world. For this reason, rememory can take on a life of its own, as seen with the
character Beloved. While Morrison’s concept of rememory offers valuable insight into
our understanding of time and memory in the Gothic novel, it is also implicitly bound to
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the atrocities of slavery as a shared experience. While Beloved exists to Sethe as a
rememory, she is part of a broader collective experience that allows Sethe and others to
engage with this memory. As Sethe notes, in her metaphor of the burning house, a
rememory exists outside of personal memory, which is confined to individual experience,
and does not need to be passed on to continue existing—it simply is. Rememories are
born from trauma; for Sethe, her time as an enslaved woman at Sweet Home is traumatic.
Sweet Home and the horrors that occurred there will always exist, not just for Sethe, but
as permanent marks on the universe. Even when Sethe is gone, and even if she does not
think of her time there, the rememory will always exist. Gordon’s analysis of rememory
further defines rememory and joins the concept with her framework of haunting, writing
that:
The possibility of a collectively animated worldly memory is articulated here in
that extraordinary moment in which you—who never was there in that real
place—can bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. You are
walking down the road or into the building and you hear or see something so
clearly, something that isn't necessarily visible to anyone else. You think, "I must
be thinking it up, making it up." Yet in this moment of enchantment when you are
remembering something in the world, or something in the world is remembering
you, you are not alone or hallucinating or making something out of nothing but
your own unconscious thoughts. You have bumped into somebody else's memory;
you have encountered haunting and the picture of it the ghost imprints. (166)
Thus, Gordon situates the idea of haunting as a kind of social memory, suggesting that
the ghosts that haunt us may be a product of memories that belong to ourselves or others.
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Though a working understanding of the concept of rememory is necessary here, I note
that rememory’s racial association and its ties to the traumatic collective experience of
slavery prevent us from effectively mapping it onto the novels under consideration in
“Haunted Women.”
Gordon’s framework for understanding literary haunting also speaks to the
connections between haunting and time. In the haunted space, concepts of time become
particularly skewed. Often, haunting means that “the over-and-done-with comes alive”
and that linear time collapses in on itself, allowing the repressed past to resurface and
touch the present (xvi). This, Gordon argues, is when “ghosts” appear, acting as a sign
that this collapse has occurred (xvi). Ultimately, Gordon argues that haunting is a loss of
repression of the past—when repression fails, haunting demands to be dealt with. That is,
the things in the past that we have been running from must be confronted in the present.
Using Gordon’s framework, we can understand that the literary hauntings under
examination result from something that has been repressed, either on a societal or
personal level. In Rebecca, the haunting does not manifest in physical form—there are no
physical “signs” of haunting (i.e., ghosts). However, the narrator is nonetheless haunted
by the memory of Rebecca and fears of her own inadequacy in the upper-class world she
has been thrust into. In The Haunting of Hill House, the failure to repress the past results
in the supernatural occurrences that plague the house and Eleanor. Finally, in Mexican
Gothic, High Place is haunted by the history of sexual abuse and colonialism that the
Doyle family has wrought. In each of these novels, the repression that has allowed time
and space to function as “normal” has failed—thus resulting in haunting.
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In each of these narratives, it is the women who are affected by this failure of
repression— and also the women who have been repressed in the name of the patriarchy.
Ultimately, haunting allows women of the past and present to communicate with one
another, a secret language that exists beyond the patriarchal world we know and accept as
real. “Haunted Women” finds that haunting offers a different way of understanding the
world around us—it is a way for women to circumvent the conventional understandings
of time and gender roles, seeing how the past, present, and future are always connected.
In the following chapters, “Haunted Women” works to highlight the relationship
between haunting and gender in the Gothic novel, examining how women navigate issues
of time, memory, and repression and how communities of women formed under these
conditions navigate relationships within the haunted space. In women’s gothic novels,
haunting and the feminization of the haunted space are a means of reclaiming agency
within the patriarchal home. The following chapters of “Haunted Women” are arranged
to display a range of relationships among women and manifestations of haunting. This
spectrum ranges from the competitive relationships forged by Rebecca’s idealized
woman-ghost to the smothering mother-child relationships repeated within The Haunting
of Hill House, and finally, to the solidarity found among women in the haunted spaces of
Mexican Gothic. Beginning with chapter two, I will turn my attention to Daphne du
Maurier’s Rebecca, published in 1938, to explore the power of memory to haunt and how
Rebecca’s haunting of Manderley demonstrates the competitive relationships among
women created by social expectations under the patriarchy. My discussion of Shirley
Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in chapter three will center around the
feminization of the haunting space and the circularity of time through haunting, also
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exploring the smothering mother-child relationship between Hill House and its female
inhabitants. Finally, chapter four will focus on Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel
Mexican Gothic, considering how haunting aids in the reconciliation of trauma and
creates community among women, examining how literary haunting, typically so
concerned with the past, may look toward the future. By drawing on these different
aspects of haunting through these selections of literary hauntings authored by women,
“Haunted Women” demonstrates women’s relationship with haunting, time, memory, and
gender in the Gothic novel.
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CHAPTER II
JE REVIENS: THE GHOSTS OF MEMORY IN DAPHNE DU
MAURIER’S REBECCA
Introduction
The Gothic novel Rebecca was published by English author Daphne du Maurier
in 1938. The novel centers around an unnamed female narrator who marries widower
Maxim de Winter and moves with him to his family estate, Manderley. The narrator
struggles to adapt to life at Manderley, haunted by the memory of Rebecca, Maxim’s late
wife, and facing opposition from the head of the household staff, Mrs. Danvers. While no
ghosts present themselves in Rebecca’s pages, the narrator of the novel and the
inhabitants of Manderley are undoubtedly haunted by the past. The distinct lack of a
supernatural presence in the novel might prompt us to ask why it has been considered
alongside the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and Mexican Gothic, both of which
include at least some degree or suggestions of supernatural, otherworldly involvement in
their narratives. The answer to the question of Rebecca’s place among these texts requires
us to reconsider what it truly means to be haunted. The etymological origins of haunting,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are from the Middle English word haunten,
meaning “to practice habitually, familiarly, or frequently.” Haunting implies that
something is both familiar and lingering. Memory shares both characteristics, making it
possible for us to be haunted by our memories, as demonstrated by Rebecca.
Gordon’s framework for understanding haunting further accounts for Rebecca’s
lack of the supernatural, arguing that “if haunting describes how that which appears to be
not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-
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granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells
you a haunting is taking place” (8). Haunting, then, does not require the presence—or
even suggestion—of the supernatural. Memory, while unable to “[meddle]” in a tangible
sense, is still capable of becoming a “seething presence” of the unrepressed past that
interferes with our present. Utilizing Gordon’s framework of haunting helps us to better
understand the role that memory plays within the novel, particularly in terms of
repression and the inescapability of the past. Rebecca’s memory—for better or worse—
haunts both the pages of du Maurier’s novel and the minds of Manderley’s inhabitants.
Rebecca presents a different kind of haunted woman in the narrator, one who is tortured
by the lingering presence of her husband’s late wife, Rebecca. Haunted by both the
ghostly products of her own imagination and the rose-colored memories of those around
her, the narrator seems unable to escape the shadow Rebecca has cast over Manderley. In
du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca’s power to haunt derives from memory, social power, and
female relationships. This chapter will consider the imagined relationship between
Rebecca and the narrator, as well as the relationship of Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers, and the
household staff of Manderley, framing the narrator and Rebecca’s overlapping identities
as Mrs. de Winter and the staff's continued execution of Rebecca's will as a sort of
possession allowing Rebecca to influence life at Manderley in the present on a physical
level from beyond the grave. By exploring the powerful role of memory as haunting
within the novel, “Haunted Women” will work towards an understanding of how
Rebecca represents the relationship between haunting, memory, and female community,
showing how Rebecca’s haunting alternatively reinforces and undermines the patriarchal
and classist structures within the novel and warps female relationships. This chapter of
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“Haunted Women” will ultimately consider how haunting in Rebecca, rather than being
used by women as a tool of subversion because of its ability to connect women of the
past and present, reinforces the very systems of power that have poisoned the
relationships between women of the novel, pitting them against one another and
compelling them to participate in and perpetuate these cycles of toxicity and trauma.
Memory in Conflict: The Social Life of Memory in Rebecca
In Rebecca, the lingering, ghostly presence of Rebecca is created through the
memories that haunt Manderley. The concept of memory may be considered in a variety
of ways, as demonstrated by Morrison’s portrayal of memory in Beloved. In the novel,
there are two kinds of memory at work, which can be described as personal and
collective memory. Personal memory is experienced by and belongs to an individual,
while collective memory incorporates sociality into memory and exists as something that
lives outside of oneself, as rememory suggests. For Maxim, memory is viewed as almost
entirely personal. After his refusal to speak of his past with the narrator, Maxim tells the
narrator that “All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a
year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up
to that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living all over
again” (du Maurier 49). Maxim believes that if he does not speak of the past, it cannot
follow him into this new life. For him, his memories are personal and controlled only by
himself; therefore, he alone has the power to ignore them and keep his past at bay,
demonstrating the kind of repression Gordon refers to.
Despite Maxim’s attempt to repress his memories of Rebecca, she still haunts
Manderley, indicating that despite his refusal to speak of the past, his repression has
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failed. This is because it is not Maxim alone who has memories of Rebecca. Within
Manderley, Mrs. Danvers and the household staff remember Rebecca without any
attempt at repression. They speak and think of Rebecca often, openly embracing the past,
allowing Rebecca’s presence to linger in Manderley in the present. Collective memory is
what allows Rebecca to maintain her hold on Manderley even in death. Mrs. Danvers and
the other members of the household staff play a large part in contributing to this
collective memory of Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca share a close bond even in the
wake of Rebecca's death. In stark contrast to Maxim’s approach to memory, Mrs.
Danvers’ relationship with the past is such that she openly and actively allows it to
influence the present, even when this goes against the wishes of her employer. The first
time Mrs. Danvers speaks of Rebecca, the narrator claims that “it was as though
[Danvers] had spoken words that were forbidden, words that she had hidden within
herself for a long time and now would be repressed no longer” (91, emphasis original).
By speaking of Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers creates the kind of failure of repression Gordon
describes as haunting. However, it is not just Mrs. Danvers that helps to create this
haunting; it is the broader, collective memory of the social world of Manderley that helps
to construct Rebecca’s ghost.
These conflicting conceptions of memory found within the novel are also
demonstrated by the narrator, whose belief in personal memory and lived experience with
collective memory come into conflict with one another throughout the novel. When the
narrator dreams of Manderley at the beginning of the novel, she decides that she must
“keep the things that hurt to [her]self alone” but acknowledges that “color and scent and
sound, rain and the lapping of water, even the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood
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time, these are memories of Manderley that will not be denied” (du Maurier 10). The
narrator allows herself to indulge in memories of Manderley but decides not to discuss
them with Maxim to spare him pain. She, like Maxim, believes that by forgetting about
Rebecca or keeping her thoughts of Rebecca and Manderley to herself, she will be able to
leave Rebecca in the past, and she will not be able to interfere with her life in the present.
However, the social nature of Rebecca’s memory makes this impossible. Rebecca is
given life by the power and influence of her memory over Manderley. It is not enough for
Maxima and the narrator to put Rebecca out of their minds, effectively closing the door
on the past, because the collective memory of Rebecca still exists and cannot be
controlled by one individual. The narrator’s first impression of Rebecca is her signature
in the inscription of the book she gifted to Maxim. The inscription troubles the narrator,
as it is her first encounter with Rebecca and the first thing that gives her shape in the
narrator’s mind beyond the general knowledge that Maxim is a widower. The inscription
is a piece of the past that continues to exist in the present and begins the narrator’s
experience with haunting. The narrator, though she imagines the dead to “[sleep] in
peace,” considers: “How alive was her writing though, how full of force. Those curious,
sloping letters. The blob of ink. Done yesterday. It was just as if it had been written
yesterday” (du Maurier 72). This remnant of Rebecca makes her real and brings her to
life for the narrator, situating her firmly in the present.
In response to the discomfort the narrator experiences with this haunting memory
of Rebecca’s inscription, the narrator decides to “[take] [her] nail scissors from the
dressing-case and cut the page, looking over [her] shoulder like a criminal” (72). By
removing the page from the book, she is trying to ignore the evidence of Rebecca that has
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been presented to her, effectively hoping that by doing so, she will be able to remove
Rebecca from the present. However, it is not enough for the narrator to just remove the
inscription from the book; she finds that “[she] kept thinking of the torn scraps in the
basket, and after a moment [she] had to get up and look in the basket once more. Even
now the ink stood up on the fragments thick and black, the writing was not destroyed”
(72-73). The narrator’s attitude towards Rebecca’s inscription reflects her perspective on
all of Manderley. The knowledge that “[she] was not the first one to lounge there in
possession of the chair; someone had been before [her], and surely left an imprint of her
person on the cushions, and on the arm where her hand had rested” tortures the narrator
(97). She sees Rebecca everywhere in the estate, unable to forget Rebecca’s presence
there despite being unable to see her. Rebecca’s memory has such a strong hold over
Manderley that, for the narrator, she almost seems to transcend memory, situating
Rebecca squarely in the present, though the narrator has never met the former Mrs. de
Winter. While the reader never gets the sense that this is anything more than the
narrator’s imagination—almost certainly nothing supernatural is at work within the
novel—her descriptions of the powerful memory of Rebecca and the power she still
wields over Manderley from beyond the grave make Rebecca’s haunting clear.
Thus, the version of Rebecca we see in the novel is partially a result of collective
memory, but also of the narrator’s imagination and her own insecurities. However, it is
important to note that within the novel, memory is not necessarily truth; it is subjective.
The idyllic version of Rebecca that haunts Manderley and the narrator is not the “real”
version of Rebecca that Maxim knows, who is cruel and unfaithful. These memories are
merely perceptions of who Rebecca was and reflections of the image she wanted to
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project to the world. As we learn from Maxim, the shared memory of Rebecca is a far cry
from what he knows to be reality, and this is exactly what Rebecca wanted. In the social
world, Rebecca’s memory has taken on a life of its own, and the perfect version of
Rebecca presented to the narrator through collective memory is only heightened by the
narrator’s own anxieties and insecurities about her role in Manderley. Rebecca, then,
becomes not only a product of the false image she projected in life, but also a reflection
of all the admirable and socially expected qualities that the narrator believes herself not to
possess.
Feminist scholars have often examined the gendered dynamics of Rebecca,
arguing, as Auba Llompart Pons notes, that Rebecca has either been read as a villainous
adulterer or as a victim of her husband with nearly equal frequency. This chapter does not
endeavor to weigh in on this question of victimhood, but rather expands upon this
scholarly conversation to consider how this gendered understanding of the novel affects
our reading of the haunted space. Llompart Pons writes that “at a symbolic level, Rebecca
can be read as a supernatural force that threatens to feminize the estate and the patriarch,
by challenging patriarchal order and heterosexuality” (74). Rebecca, or at least the side of
her that the world remembers, is the perfect wife, elevating Manderley and the de Winters
in the social hierarchy through her management of their social affairs and the estate. On
the surface, Rebecca’s performance of femininity and fulfillment of these societal
obligations as Mrs. de Winter makes her an exemplary wife and woman and helps to
uphold the patriarchal image of Manderley. However, the side of Rebecca revealed to the
narrator by Maxim is anything but a perfect wife. Maxim describes Rebecca as
“incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. She was not even normal” (339). The real
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Rebecca is the opposite of the image she projects to the outside world. Llompart Pons
argues that Rebecca’s complicated relationship with the patriarchy is because while her
concealed actions subvert the gender expectations of the time, “[she] needs [the
patriarchy] to protect and conceal her unaccepted sexual behaviour under the image of a
perfect wife” (80). Essentially, Rebecca wants to have her cake and eat it too—she does
not want to actually become the perfect woman by giving up her indulgences, but she
does want the social power and esteem that comes with this image.
When the narrator arrives at Manderley, the delicate balance of power that exists
within is threatened, and the resulting power struggle is reminiscent of the inheritance
issues commonly found in the Gothic novel. The inheritance plot within the Gothic novel
serves to draw the reader’s attention to the history of the estate and the importance of
ownership, but the transfer of property from one generation to the next is also a way of
transferring power from one individual to another. For this reason, understanding that the
inheritance plot symbolizes the ways that the past holds power over the present. While
there is no question that by law, the house belongs to Maxim regardless of what
happens—short of his death, the issue of inheritance in Rebecca does not concern itself
with the legal aspects of Manderley’s ownership, but rather focuses on the social power
wielded by the woman at the head of the house. While Maxim may be the legal owner
and rightful heir of Manderley, Maxim often seems to be a guest in his own home,
relegating himself to a separate, less impressive wing of the house after Rebecca’s death
and exiling himself to Monte Carlo to get away from the estate.
In terms of haunting, this means that the shadow Rebecca’s haunting casts over
Manderley has even greater implications for hauntings tied to gender and memory.
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Rebecca’s haunting is constructed through collective memory, and what people
remember about Rebecca is the image of perfection that simultaneously upholds
Manderley’s glory and the patriarchal ideals it represents in society. However, the
construction of Rebecca’s haunting memory and apparent possession of the home
contradicts this idea because it is Rebecca, not Maxim, who lays claim over Manderley
and the household staff. It is Rebecca’s orders which are followed, even beyond the
grave. Rebecca’s possession of the estate demonstrates the magnitude of her power, so
much so that Rebecca—through her possession of Mrs. Danvers—even has the power to
take Manderley away from Maxim when it burns. Thus, it is the matriarch, rather than the
patriarch, who truly controls Manderley. It will always belong to Rebecca; it will always
be a matriarchal space within the home, regardless of how it may appear to the outside
world. However, while Rebecca’s control over Manderley initially seems subversive, her
ability to maintain this control depends on keeping the patriarchal and classist structures
intact. This subversion of the patriarchy by female power still leaves the patriarchy in
place, acting as a structure that conceals female power. What allows Rebecca power is
the patriarchal expectations of women’s role in society, so there is no way for Rebecca to
maintain her power and “overthrow” the patriarchal hold on Manderley. Her power in
Manderley must be ghostly and relegated to the shadows.
It is notable, too, that though the fact of Rebecca’s possession of Manderley
undermines the patriarchal ideas the estate represents, Rebecca makes no attempts to rid
Manderley of its classist and patriarchal structures. Rebecca is not trying to overthrow
anything—she just wants agency. She still very much wants and needs to keep the
patriarchy and its elite social standing in place and keep the status of Manderley in high
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regard because this is where her social power derives from. Rebecca’s haunting and
possession of Manderley mean nothing if these structures are not kept intact because
these structures, even when undermined in secret, give Rebecca power.
Rebecca’s Possession
In the novel, the collective memory of Rebecca seems to be inescapable, allowing
her hold over Manderley to be reinforced even in her absence. Rebecca’s ability to haunt
is not only due to her memory looming over Manderley, but also because of her
continued ability to exercise her influence and act over the living. This action is a kind of
possession of spirit—for example, through her influence over the household staff of
Manderley, Rebecca is able to maintain control over the estate and continue to run it
according to her preferences. The novel’s narrator struggles to find an identity of her
own. She continually refers to her own plainness and inexperience, and the repeated
remarks about the insufficiency of her clothes point towards a sense of class anxiety that
firmly situates her as an outsider within Manderley and reminds us that she is not fitting
of what society expects her to be as Mrs. de Winter.
It is the narrator’s lack of identity that leaves primes her for possession.
Throughout the course of the novel, the reader never even learns her name. Her only
semblance of an identity is as ‘Mrs. de Winter,’ but even then, this is an identity that she
shares with Rebecca. When given the opportunity to express her own wishes and take
control over a situation, the narrator is often undermined by her own insecurities. For
example, when Mrs. Danvers questions the narrator about her preferences on the dinner
menu, the narrator, insecure in her own ability to make the appropriate choice, defers to
Rebecca, stating: “Oh, well… let me see, Mrs. Danvers, I hardly know; I think we had
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better have what you usually have, whatever you think Mrs. de Winter would have
ordered” and denies having a preference of her own (108). The narrator gives her agency
over to Rebecca easily, allowing her to continue shaping daily life at Manderley despite
her physical absence. The narrator is also actively aware of her apparent possession at the
hands of Rebecca but is unable or unwilling to fight against it. She often finds herself
noting her own actions mimicking Rebecca’s actions at the advice of the household staff,
thinking to herself: “Rebecca did this. She took the lilac, as I am doing, and put the sprigs
one by one in the white vase. I’m not the first to do it. This is Rebecca’s vase, this is
Rebecca’s lilac” (173). The narrator’s awareness of the control Rebecca has over her and
the whole of Manderley is made apparent in the way she reflects on her actions. A similar
possession occurs when the narrator is dining with Maxim one night, imagining what
Rebecca would have done and finding herself carrying out the actions as Rebecca would
have (249-250). When Maxim questions the narrator about her actions, she reveals that
“in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, [she] had so identified [her]self with
Rebecca that [her] own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley” (251). The
blurring of identity between the narrator and Rebecca is also particularly obvious at the
Manderley Ball when the narrator is told: “Why, the dress, you poor dear, the picture you
copied of the girl in the gallery. It was what Rebecca did at the last fancy dress ball at
Manderley. Identical. The same picture, the same dress. You stood there on the stairs, and
for one ghastly moment I thought…” (270). When Mrs. de Winter dons an imitation of
the dress of Maxim’s ancestor, Caroline de Winter, from the portrait in the gallery, she
believes that she is drawing on the memory of that woman alone—however, she quickly
finds that she also has drawn on Rebecca’s memory. There are several layers of blurred
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identity that occur in this scene. While the narrator attempts to dress as the woman in the
portrait, she ends up appearing as an imitation of Rebecca instead. It is interesting that,
despite both women donning the costume of Caroline’s portrait, the narrator’s costume is
immediately associated with Rebecca rather than the “famous London beauty” that was
Caroline de Winter (254). This association demonstrates the power of Rebecca’s memory
in the social sphere and the permanent marks she has left behind on the social world of
Manderley that linger even after her death. It is only when a new maid is employed that
the narrator experiences a true separation between herself and Rebecca. The maid,
Clarice, never having met Rebecca, does not share in the collective memory as the rest of
the household staff do. She is an outsider, and the narrator believes that “[Clarice] was
the only person in the house who stood in awe of [her]. To [Clarice] [she] was the
mistress: [she] was Mrs. de Winter. The possible gossip of the others could not affect
her” (170). Because Clarice does not share in the collective memory of Rebecca as the
other members of the staff do, she exists outside of Rebecca’s haunting, and her
perception of the narrator as Mrs. de Winter is not influenced by the past.
It is notable that this is all the design of Mrs. Danvers, who plants the idea in the
narrator’s mind to dress as Caroline de Winter’s portrait, and Danvers who suggests the
dressmaker in London to her. Thus, Danvers helps to facilitate Rebecca’s possession of
the narrator and the identity of Mrs. de Winter. In spirit, Manderley is Rebecca’s, even in
death. Her ownership over the house is continually asserted by the household staff—in
particular, Mrs. Danvers. When the narrator moves into Manderley, presumably taking on
the role of the head of the household as Maxim’s wife, Rebecca’s ownership over
Manderley is seemingly challenged. As the new Mrs. de Winter, the social expectation
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for the narrator is that she will take on the duties and social obligations that Rebecca had
previously fulfilled. As we learn from others on social occasions, Rebecca had a
reputation for hosting a variety of social gatherings and hosted many guests throughout
the year, seeming to be wildly popular. Since her death, these gatherings have been
discontinued, but when the narrator arrives at Manderley, it is the expectation that she
will have an interest in resuming these activities according to the social standards of the
time, in which women oversaw managing the social relationships of the family while
their husbands ran the estate. Indeed, the narrator seems to feel this pressure to perform
these duties, which is how she ends up hosting the Manderley Ball in the first place.
The clear allegiance of Mrs. Danvers and household staff to Rebecca reinforces
the idea of Rebecca’s control over the estate. Rebecca’s haunting is owed, in part, to the
staff’s routine execution of daily life at Manderley. As the staff often remarks, there have
been no changes made to the execution of the daily routines carried out by the staff unless
they have been specifically requested to do so. Though this is due, in part, to the
narrator’s lack of experience and understanding as to how to run such an estate, this is
also because of the powerful hold Rebecca still has over the household staff. As the
narrator observes:
[Rebecca] was in the house still, as Mrs. Danvers had said; she was in that room
in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning room, in the gallery above
the hall […] The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she
liked. […] Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley. Rebecca was still Mrs. de
Winter. (291, emphasis original)
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The default for the staff is not to defer to the narrator as the new mistress of Manderley
but to carry out their jobs according to the standard Rebecca has set, a precedent which is
set by Mrs. Danvers’ continued invocation of the past, as household staff, overall, do not
display much agency within the novel. Rather, it is their leadership under Mrs. Danvers,
and, consequently, Rebecca’s hold over her, that causes them to act in this way. Mrs.
Danvers and the household staff follow Rebecca’s direction and execute household duties
according to her expectations. After her death, the household staff continue to follow
Rebecca’s orders, keeping Manderley running as Rebecca would have liked. In
performing these duties, the household staff act as extensions of Rebecca and, in a sense,
act as living beings possessed by her spirit.
Haunted Relationships Among Women
For Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca is, and always will be, the mistress of Manderley, and
she ensures this by continuing to run the house according to Rebecca’s standards and
constantly recalling Rebecca to the minds of Manderley’s inhabitants. By invoking the
past, Mrs. Danvers effectively undoes the work Maxim has put into repressing memories
of Rebecca, and for Mrs. Danvers, this haunting is welcome. Mrs. Danvers wants to
remain haunted by Rebecca because this is a way of keeping Rebecca with her. Mrs.
Danvers watched Rebecca grow up, acting as a maternal figure in her life and holding a
deep admiration for the young woman. As such, the loss of Rebecca is not merely a loss
of her mistress, but also a loss of a daughter figure. Danvers is distressed by the narrator’s
presence within Manderley not because she has made any changes to the estate, but
simply because she exists in the space that had once been Rebecca’s. The language Mrs.
Danvers uses to describe the narrator’s position in the home during their confrontation is
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reflective of the distress she feels over Rebecca’s absence. Mrs. Danvers tells the
narrator: “She’s still mistress here, even if she is dead. She’s the real Mrs. de Winter, not
you. It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost. It’s you that’s forgotten and not wanted and
pushed aside. Well, why don’t you leave Manderley to her? Why don’t you go?’” (du
Maurier 307, emphasis original). Mrs. Danvers fears that the “real” Mrs. de Winter is
being “forgotten” and that, despite her refusal to let Rebecca go, the world around her is
still moving on (37). The threat of Rebecca being forgotten and no longer being able to
haunt Manderley is so pressing for Danvers that she tries to convince the narrator to
commit suicide to eliminate this possibility. The lengths that Danvers will go to for
Rebecca, including destroying Manderley altogether, demonstrate a warped kind of
haunted female community and solidarity. While the narrator is left alone in her jealousy
and uncertainty, Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca share a close, loving relationship even after
Rebecca’s death. Regardless of the warmth between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, there is a
clear toxicity within this female community. Mrs. Danvers admires and depends on
Rebecca to the point of near insanity. She is willing to humiliate the narrator, even
attempting to drive her to suicide in the name of Rebecca’s memory. Thus, the primary
female relationships within the novel are all marked by a toxicity that derives, ultimately,
from the classist and patriarchal expectations of society around them. The
competitiveness and insecurity that both Danvers and the narrator feel are influenced by
the perfect image of Rebecca created through haunting. The forgetting that Danvers
struggles against and the insecurity that the narrator feels is born from a society that pits
women against each other and forces them to compete over who can be the most ideal
woman. For Danvers, this means that she must protect Rebecca’s image as the perfect
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mistress of Manderley, and for the narrator, this means constantly measuring herself
against the impossibly high standards set by Rebecca’s alleged perfection.
Thus, the narrator’s relationship with herself is influenced by Rebecca’s haunting
presence looming over her. It is not just the relationships women have with each other
that are turned toxic by the expectations of society, but also with themselves. Rebecca is,
for the narrator, a reflection of everything that she has failed to be, after all. What haunts
her is not just the memory of Rebecca, but also the constant reminder that she is not
living up to society's expectations of her as Mrs. de Winter. It is only when the narrator
comes to understand that the ghost of Rebecca is not a reflection of reality that the
narrator is able to free herself from Rebecca’s possession and her inner ghosts. When the
narrator begins to stand up for herself against Mrs. Danvers, she is able to assert her own
possession of her identity as Mrs. de Winter. By the end of the novel, when Danvers tells
the narrator how Rebecca had always communicated to her over the house phone, the
narrator responds: “I’m afraid it does not concern me very much what Mrs. de Winter
used to do […] I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know. And if I choose to send a message
by Robert I shall do so” (363). It is only when Maxim reveals the truth of what happened
with Rebecca and the illusion of Rebecca’s perfection is shattered and she feels that she
is no longer being forced to compete with her that she can be free from this toxic
relationship with herself.
Burning Manderley
The burning of Manderley symbolizes the destruction of the past. Because the
home symbolizes a connection to the past, when the house is destroyed, this is a way of
severing that connection. However, because Rebecca’s haunting is rooted in memory
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rather than a place, this severing does not occur. Before Maxim and the narrator discover
Manderley burning, the narrator renews her effort to gain control of the estate, vowing
that:
It was going to be very different in the future. I was not going to be nervous and
shy with the servants anymore. With Mrs. Danvers gone I should learn bit by bit
to control the house. I would go and interview the cook in the kitchen. They
would like me, respect me. Soon it would be as though Mrs. Danvers had never
had command. (469)
Despite the narrator's preparation to assume the social power that comes with being Mrs.
de Winter, Manderley will never be hers and will always belong to Rebecca. Manderley
will always be Rebecca’s legacy, while Maxim and the narrator are further estranged
from the estate when they begin to travel abroad. In the novel, Rebecca’s haunting is
inescapable. Both Maxim and the narrator believe that the destruction of Manderley will
destroy the past, but this is not true. Even at the beginning of the novel, when we believe
that Maxim and the narrator have effectively escaped Manderley, memory continues to
be a dangerous and powerful thing. Though Manderley is the symbol of everything that
haunts the narrator, Rebecca is still a part of their memories. All Rebecca needs to exist is
memory, and though the house is burned and the staff are gone, both Rebecca and
Manderley continue to haunt Maxim and the narrator.
Though at the end of the novel, Maxim and the narrator find happiness in each
other away from Manderley, Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers still get what they always
wanted. The novel opens with the narrator’s dream of an idyllic Manderley, a place that
she cannot return to or even speak of. Manderley will never be hers because it was
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always Rebecca’s. As Maxim informs the narrator, “the beauty of Manderley that you see
today, the Manderley that people talk about and photograph and paint, it’s all due to her,
to Rebecca” (343). Manderley is Rebecca’s legacy, and, ultimately, what Rebecca wants
and values is to be remembered as what she always pretended to be. Maxim tells the
narrator:
[Rebecca] made a bargain with me up there, on the side of the precipice,” he said.
“‘I’ll run your house for you,’ she told me, ‘I’ll look after your precious
Manderley for you, make it the most famous show-place in all the country, if you
like. And people will visit us, and envy us, and talk about us; they’ll say we are
the luckiest, happiest, handsomest couple in all England. What a leg-pull, Max!’
she said, ‘what a God-damn triumph!’ (341)
Rebecca’s celebrity as Mrs. de Winter and the head of Manderley is what is most
important to her, and at the time, to Maxim. In this sense, it is Rebecca who truly wins at
the end of the novel. The memory of Rebecca that haunts Manderley prevents the
narrator from ever living up to her reputation. Mrs. Danvers believes so strongly in
Rebecca’s claim over Manderley that it must be destroyed because it cannot exist without
Rebecca. While the narrator and Maxim may get their happy ending, they lose the esteem
and social power than comes from Manderley. This power will always belong to
Rebecca. This loss of social power is not necessarily a negative thing for Maxim and the
narrator. While Maxim formerly placed great value in upholding the reputation of
Manderley and his family name, he does not seem to care about this by the end of the
novel. For the narrator, social power has never been important, and she never truly has
the power to begin with. Their separation from the estate, though resulting in a loss of
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social power, also frees them from the patriarchal and classist structures that
Manderley—and by extension, Rebecca—represents. The loss of Manderley ends up
being the best thing for them, as by distancing themselves from Manderley, they are also
able to distance themselves from the things that haunt them and move toward a better
future.
Conclusion
The haunted presence of Rebecca throughout the novel is created by memory, but
the memory of Rebecca that is manifested by the collective memory of Manderley’s
inhabitants and the social world that surrounds it is a product of patriarchal and classist
expectations for women that have painted Rebecca as the ideal woman and wife. Rather
than utilizing haunting as a method of overthrowing these structures, the haunting within
Rebecca serves to reinforce them by possessing the inhabitants of Manderley and pitting
the women within the novel against one another. Though the narrator and Maxim get
their happy ending at the end of the novel, free of Manderley and Rebecca, they do so at
the cost of the illusion of social power and esteem that comes with being the master and
mistress of Manderley. Thus, Rebecca maintains the social power she fought for in both
life and death, leaving intact the patriarchal and classist structures that have granted her
this social power. The relationships among women within the novel are continually
warped by society, and while haunting allows for the women of the past and present to
convene within the novel, there is no solidarity in this, only competition.
Thus, haunting in Rebecca lacks the “something-to-be-done” quality that
Gordon’s framework outlines. There is no change that results from Rebecca’s haunting of
Manderley, and while it does bring the past that has been repressed into the present and
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form a community of women, it does not look to the future or pave the way for any
changes to the systems that made this toxic and competitive state of existence for women
possible. At the end of the novel, the reader is left with the knowledge that du Maurier’s
literary haunting has done nothing to remedy the broader societal issues of patriarchal
and classist expectations that haunt the women within the novel.
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CHAPTER III
‘PERHAPS IT WILL NOT LET US GO’: MATERNAL
HAUNTING IN SHIRLEY JACKSON’S THE HAUNTING
OF HILL HOUSE
Introduction
Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is one of the most
iconic examples of haunting in modern literature. Jackson’s novel brings a group of
strangers-turned-supernatural investigators to the infamous Hill House, the former family
estate of the Crains. The novel’s protagonist, Eleanor, comes to Hill House after the death
of her sickly mother, whom she has spent her life caring for. Though Eleanor struggles to
leave the past behind and find a place for herself in the world beyond her mother’s home,
she finds herself captive in Hill House. While previous scholarship has explored the issue
of femininity and maternity in The Haunting of Hill House, the implications of
understanding Hill House as a feminine and maternal space have yet to be discussed in
terms of Hill House’s history and the circularity of the novel. In The Haunting of Hill
House, the issue of time is explored through the circularity of female relationships, and
the haunted presence within the house is maternalized, protecting the women within from
the patriarchal world beyond Hill House. By exploring The Haunting of Hill House’s
history, construction, and cyclicality, “Haunted Women” seeks an understanding of the
feminization of the haunted space and the circular relationships among women within the
novel, arguing that despite Hill House’s intentions to protect its female inhabitants from
the traumas of the patriarchal outside world, Hill House’s smothering maternal presence
ultimately perpetuates the same cycles of abuse.
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The Women of Hill House
Exploring the female inhabitants and relationships of Hill House’s past is crucial
for gaining an understanding of Hill House’s haunting. Pascal has previously dismissed
the need to turn to the past in The Haunting of Hill House because of the “dismissive lack
of interest” in the wives of Hugh Crain (470). While I share Pascal’s belief that “the
overbearing mother that harasses Eleanor is not fully intelligible as a latter day
counterpart of any of Hill House's previous maternal residents,” I disagree with the claim
that “its domineering maternal wraith is less a nameless Thing from a frightening past, as
is the convention in much Gothic narrative, than she is a manifestation of what modernity
has transformed motherhood into” (470, emphasis original). The binary Pascal presents
between the past and modernity is an artificial one, particularly when it comes to
haunting and the Gothic’s relationship with the continually returning past. The past and
present can and do coexist within Hill House, and as such, it is imperative that the history
of the women of Hill House presented in the novel be given scholarly attention. Rather
than considering Jackson’s novel as a deviation from the typical Gothic ghost story in
terms of its relationship to time, I find that, like most Gothic novels, The Haunting of Hill
House is obsessed with the past; a past that is not only responsible for the novel’s
apparent haunting, but also mirrors itself onto the present. While the novel may be a
testament to 1950s society, as Pascal describes, it is also a reminder of the inescapable
truth of our past, and it is for this reason that the brief passages dedicated to Hill House’s
history must be further explored.
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The History of Hill House
Turning again to the entanglement of haunting and time, Jackson’s novel offers a
brief history of Hill House’s early years and inhabitants. Jackson’s novel directs the
reader toward several possible explanations for Hill House’s haunting, including the
house’s design and early history. Dr. Montague, speaking on the origins of the house,
suggests that:
Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of
holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses
are born bad. Hill House, whatever the cause, has been unfit for human habitation
for upwards of twenty years. What it was like before then, whether its personality
was molded by the people who lived here, or the things they did, or whether it
was evil from its start are all questions I cannot answer. (Jackson 42-43)
Here, Dr. Montague offers two suggestions for how we might understand the cause of
Hill House’s haunting. The first, is that Hill House is inherently evil, or was “born bad”
(Jackson 42). The suggestion that Hill House’s apparent wrongness is built into its very
structure is further supported by the revelation that Hugh Crain’s design for the house is
misleading to the naked eye, and that “angles which you assume are the right angles you
are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a
degree of in one direction or another” (64). However, Dr. Montague also offers a
suggestion that fits into the framework for haunting that Gordon has offered us: that
haunting is a failure to repress the past. Dr. Montague suggests that “[Hill House’s]
personality was molded by the people who lived [there], or the things they did” (43).
Though Dr. Montague uses the term “personality” here, what he refers to are the “signs”
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of haunting that occur within the space. Thus, the suggestion is that the signs of Hill
House’s haunting have been shaped—in some way—by the events of the past. Within the
world of Hill House, these events have made permanent impressions on Hill House that
the passing of time cannot erase.
Notably, Dr. Montague’s role as the “explainer” of Hill House’s history is
inherently unreliable. Though he is presented as the authority on the background of Hill
House due to his role as a scientific researcher and the leader of the investigation, his
reliability is hindered by his role as an outsider to Hill House. Knowledge about Hill
House does not come directly from the inhabitants of the house, because no living
inhabitants of the house exist. The knowledge about Hill House has been filtered through
several different sources, including the nearby town and Luke’s family, whose
information on Hill House is already secondhand or based on reputation. Dr. Montague
further filters the history of Hill House through the patriarchal and rational lens that he
views the world through. As Kosmina notes, this way of narrating history is typically an
unreliable way of understanding women of the past (903). If Hill House is to be
understood as a haunted feminine and maternal space, then one must acknowledge the
disadvantages of and potential biases in Dr. Montague’s presentation of Hill House’s
history. Similarly, in the opening chapter of The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson notes
that Dr. Montague encounters Eleanor and Theodora because their names were found in
records of psychic activity (Jackson 2). Both Eleanor and Theodora have shown signs of
having a psychic connection to the world around them. Jackson notes that shortly after
the death of Eleanor’s father there was an incident at their family home in which stones
rained down from the sky for three days until Eleanor and her sister were removed from
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the house (Jackson 3-4). Theodora's name appeared in the records because she was able
to correctly identify a series of markings on cards in a laboratory experiment without
having seen them (4). Even Theodora’s acceptance of Dr. Montague's invitation to join
him for the summer at Hill House is colored by the implication of Theodora's psychic
abilities as Jackson notes that she had initially intended to decline the invitation but felt a
pull towards hill house just as Eleanor did (4-5). It is only the women in the novel who
are noted to have these psychic abilities, as Dr. Montague takes on a wholly scientific
approach to his investigation of Hill House and Luke's presence in the group is a result of
his family's ownership of the property. Thus, within Jackson's novel, it is the women who
are particularly attuned and subject to Hill Houses' psychic occurrences. Whereas men
view the world through science and rationality, Eleanor and Theodora already have
experience with these different ways of interacting with and existing in the world.
Despite the questionable nature of Dr. Montague’s authority to speak on Hill House, the
background information Dr. Montague presents is valuable and fruitful for discussion of
the women of the past, so long as we are aware of the potential inaccuracies.
A House Built Wrong
As Dr. Montague discusses the history of Hill House, one learns that the house
was originally built by Hugh Crain. Dr. Montague suggests that Hill House, by its very
construction, is a reflection of Hugh Crain. Indeed, the domineering presence of Crain
weighs heavy on the reader’s mind as we learn of the house’s history and as we consider
the act of construction. In the novel, the construction of the house by Hugh Crain
represents patriarchal control. Much like the house’s first impression of a woman is
shaped by the lifelessness of Mrs. Crain, the house’s first impression of a man is shaped
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by its relationship with Hugh Crain during its construction. The previous scholarly
conversations surrounding Hill House’s construction argue that Hill House’s apparent
evil and insanity result from its architectural design, or that Hill House acts as an
extension of Crain himself.
2
However, consideration of the act of creation allows us to
consider Hill House as a product of Hugh Crain, rather than an extension or mirror of
him. Construction is an inherently intimate and patriarchal act, one which is juxtaposed
by the maternal presence within the house itself. Unlike birth, which is a natural, organic
relationship between mother and child, the act of construction is all about control. Hugh
Crain shapes—and misshapes—the house according to his desires. For Hill House, the
act of construction is all about control, specifically the control exercised by a
domineering and cruel man like Hugh Crain, who forced the house to exist under certain
conditions, specifically by designing the house’s angles to be “slightly off” (64). The
house itself is built wrong, but it is Hugh Crain who has inflicted this state of wrongness
upon Hill House. By forcing the house to stand and hold itself together in this state of
wrongness while still functioning and appearing as any “normal” house would, Crain’s
construction of the house is inflicting a kind of trauma on the house that it will carry with
it throughout its lifetime.
Construction, then, becomes a reflection of what the patriarchy does to women.
As a victim of this patriarchal act of construction, Hill House becomes coded as a
feminine space. Hill House’s desire to rebel against this patriarchy in Hugh Crain’s
2
See Ljubica Matek’s “The Architecture of Evil: H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ and
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.”
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absence, to protect the women within from the traumas Hill House experiences at the
hands of man and the outside world, helps to create the maternal space within Hill House,
and further explains its oscillation between smothering and nurturing motherhood. Hill
House’s first impression of men is that they, like Hugh Crain, are repressive and cruel.
The feminine presence of the house, then, born under these confining and traumatic
conditions, reasserts its autonomy through haunting.
Though it is Hugh Crain who builds Hill House, he is not the primary inhabitant
of it. In actuality, Hugh Crain’s time in Hill House is relatively short, leaving behind his
daughters to travel abroad with his third wife (Jackson 46). It is his daughters, their
governess, and the companion who have the longest histories at Hill House (46).
Considering Hill House as a product designed by Crain, the patriarchal influence Crain
has over the house—and by extension, the women who inhabit it—becomes clear in its
design. As we know, Hill House was built in such a way that all angles in the home are
“slightly off” (Jackson 64). In a material sense, this means that the women who live there,
too, must live with this wrongness. They are in a constant state of being “slightly off,”
whether they are conscious of it or not (64). Indeed, Theodora and Eleanor seem to feel
this sense of disorientation during their time in the house, even before Montague reveals
the key to understanding Crain’s design. If Crain has built the house to be slightly wrong
and disorienting when inside, then he has effectively shaped the way the women who
inhabit the home experience being in the house. They are forced to live with and adapt to
this wrongness. As with Hill House itself, this is a further reflection of women’s lives
under patriarchal control on a broader societal scale.
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The Crain Family
As Dr. Montague’s historical discussion continues, one begins to note a pattern of
tragedy amongst the female residents of Hill House. One learns that “Hugh Crain’s young
wife died minutes before she first was to set eyes on the house, when the carriage
bringing her here overturned in the driveway, and the lady was brought—ah, lifeless, I
believe is the phrase they use—into the home her husband had built for her” (Jackson
46). The first woman Hill House ever knows is dead. Like the house’s impression of men
and the outside world at large is shaped by the cruel and confining treatment of the house
at the hands of Hugh Crain, the house’s first impression of women is one of lifelessness
and fragility, someone who has been harmed by the outside world of man. When Dr.
Montague continues, one learns that after the death of Crain’s first wife, he married
“twice more” and that “the second Mrs. Crain died of a fall, although I have been unable
to ascertain how or why. Her death seems to have been as tragically unexpected as her
predecessor’s” (Jackson 46). Within the early years of the house’s history, there were
multiple female deaths within a short span of time. When Hugh Crain and his third wife
leave Hill House to travel abroad, Dr. Montague notes that Crain’s young daughters were
left at Hill House in the care of their governess until Hill House was closed (Jackson 46).
While Hill House may have been built by Hugh Crain, its history is marked repeatedly by
the lives and deaths of the women who have inhabited it.
Dr. Montague also notes that the eldest Crain daughter had a close relationship
with Hill House in adulthood: “Incredible as it may sound to you, she genuinely loved
Hill House and looked upon it as her family home” (Jackson 47). For the eldest daughter,
Hill House was not a place to be feared, but a safe haven. Compared to the experiences of
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the others who have lived in the house, the eldest daughter is one of the only people who
has been able to inhabit the house without issue. This is due, in part, to the maternal role
Hill House takes on in response to the death of the first Mrs. Crain. When Eleanor and
Theodora hear the knocking on the doors of their bedrooms, Eleanor notes: “It is only a
noise, and terribly cold, terribly, terribly cold. It is a noise down the hall, far down at the
end, near the nursery door, and terribly cold, not my mother knocking on the wall”
(Jackson 78, emphasis original). Later, when the cold spot is discovered at the threshold
of the nursery, Dr. Montague describes it as “the heart of the house” (Jackson 73). The
supernatural presence and activity within the house, the things that mark the house as
haunted, continually centered around the nursery where Crain’s daughters slept. While
Theodora describes the threshold as being “like the doorway of a tomb,” she also remarks
that “it’s warm enough inside” once the threshold is crossed (Jackson 73). The cold spot
in the threshold of the nursery acts as a barrier, intended to protect the children inside.
Eleanor notes that the cold is not “impartial” but rather “deliberate, as though something
wanted to give [her] an unpleasant shock” as if it is meant to warn against their intrusion
into the nursery (Jackson 74). The heart of the house being located at the threshold of the
nursery suggests a watchful, protective maternal presence within the house.
The maternal presence of Hill House is influenced initially by Hugh Crain’s
paternal presence within the home. Though Crain is not present in the novel, the impact
he’s had on Hill House is clear. The tragic death of the first Mrs. Crain prompts Hill
House to act as a mother to the children she’s left behind, but we must also acknowledge
Hugh Crain’s paternal influence over the home. As Dr. Montague notes, the death of his
wife left Crain “sad and bitter” (Jackson 46). This unhappiness is clearly reflected in
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Crain’s parenting, taking it upon himself to instruct his daughters in the moral lessons he
deemed important for children to learn. Crain does so by creating what seems to be his
own instructional book, including passages and illustrations to aid his children’s learning
(Jackson 105-106). Though Crain’s interest in his children’s moral upbringing
demonstrates his continued involvement in the children’s lives despite moving to Europe
and leaving the girls to be raised by a governess, the cruelty that Crain demonstrates in
his lessons reveals the complicated environment in which the girls grew up. Due to the
feminization of the haunted space already established by Hill House’s construction and
the knowledge of Hugh Crain’s persistent cruelty within the home with his own
daughters, the placement of the “heart of the house” at the threshold of the nursery as if to
protect and watch over the girls further suggests its maternal presence. Hill House knows
firsthand the trauma Crain’s control and the outside world may inflict, and with the first
Mrs. Crain having fallen victim to these dangers and leaving her daughters without a
mother of their own, Hill House takes it upon itself to nurture and protect the young
daughters living within.
Though Hill House initially acts as a nurturing home for the Crain sisters, it is not
necessarily a welcoming space for outsiders and begins demonstrating its smothering
maternity when the outside world begins interfering with this relationship. Initially, when
the eldest Miss Crain takes the village girl as a companion and brings her to live in the
house, they do so without issue until her death (Jackson 47). However, after the eldest
Miss Crain’s death, when the companion inherits the house rather than the youngest Miss
Crain, the house begins to protest the inheritance. It is notable that the malevolent
supernatural occurrences within Hill House do not begin until the house passes from the
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Crain family to the companion, a decision which was highly disputed by the youngest
Crain daughter after her sister's death. Thus, it seems that Hill House was happy when it
was in the hands of the Crain sisters, who were unbothered by Hill House’s maternal
presence. However, upon the sister's passing and its inheritance by the companion
strange, unexplainable, and unsettling occurrences begin, earning Hill House its infamous
reputation for insanity. This is due primarily to the separation of the child from the
maternal space, which is how Hill House views its relationship with the Crain sisters. Hill
House is angered by this separation because the youngest Crain daughter wants to come
home, but she cannot. Hill House wants to provide the youngest Crain sister with shelter
from the outside world, and the outside world is stopping that from happening.
Mothering in the Haunted Space & Female Relationships in Hill House
Hill House is further feminized by the womb imagery employed throughout the
novel. Initially, Hill House’s location nestled among the hills creates a sense of enclosure
among the inhabitants. While Eleanor initially finds the placement of the house to be
confining and unnerving, she later finds Hill House to be “gathered comfortably into the
hills […] protected and warm” (144). Thus, the isolation of Hill House from the outside
world, protected by the natural boundary of the surrounding hills, becomes a comforting
space for Eleanor, particularly as she becomes further connected to the house. Shortly
after Eleanor enters Hill House, she notes that “when she stood still in the middle of the
room the pressing silence of Hill House came back all around her. I am like a small
creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little
movements inside” (Jackson 24, emphasis original). For Eleanor, entering the house gives
her the feeling of smallness in the vast space. Eleanor feels that she has been “swallowed
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whole by a monster,” effectively placing herself in the belly—or womb— of Hill House.
Like a mother feels the movement of her unborn child, Eleanor believes that Hill House
feels her movements within, further enforcing Hill House’s maternal role and Eleanor’s
infantilization within this space.
The womb-like space within Hill House further demonstrates this protective
quality by its attempts to confine Eleanor and Theodora within while casting Dr.
Montague and Luke out. After Eleanor and Theodora reunite with Dr. Montague and
Luke after the event with the knocking sounds, the group discusses the men’s absence,
stating:
“We were chasing a dog,” Luke said. “At least, some animal like a dog.” He
stopped, and then went on reluctantly. “We followed it outside.”
Theodora stared, and Eleanor said, “You mean it was inside?”
“I saw it run past my door,” the doctor said, “just caught a glimpse of it, slipping
along. I woke Luke and we followed it down the stairs and out into the garden and
lost it somewhere back of the house.”
“The front door was open?”
“No,” Luke said. “The front door was closed. So were all the other doors. We
checked.” (82)
Because Hugh Crain is, presumably, the only male known to have inhabited the house,
when Dr. Montague and Luke enter the house, they are viewed in the same way Hill
House views Crain, as intruders in the feminine space and potentially dangerous to the
women within. Thus, the house creates the illusion of the dog luring the men outside
while keeping the women inside. Dr. Montague even suggests that “it [begins] to seem
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that the intention is, somehow, to separate [them]” (Jackson 83). Indeed, Hill House’s
separation of the men and women in the novel further feminizes the haunted space. By
leading the men outside the home and trapping the women inside of it, Hill House
attempts to protect the women inside and reinforces the separation between the haunted
space of Hill House and the world outside of it.
The smothering maternal presence of Hill House is sometimes referred to as a
kind of consumption. Rubenstein notes that “as Eleanor is progressively incorporated and
infantilized by the malign powers of Hill House, she feels as if she is quite literally being
consumed” (318-319). Hill House refuses to let go of Eleanor, and this consumption is
reminiscent of the child’s return to the safety of the mother’s womb. On the Gothic
mother, Kahane describes the relationship between the child and the maternal body,
stating that “Hers is the body, awesome and powerful, which is both our habitat and our
prison” (336-337). For Eleanor, Hill House is “both […] habitat and [..] prison” (336-
337). Hill House is a smothering mother—though it attempts to keep Eleanor safe within
its walls, it also stifles and infantilizes her just as Eleanor’s biological mother did.
Hill House as Mother
Hill House demonstrates its maternal presence through the repeated infantilization
of Eleanor. It is only when Eleanor reverts to a childlike state at the end of the novel,
giving herself over to the house’s maternal presence, that she is able to cross the
threshold of the nursery without feeling the cold that has previously disturbed her
(Jackson 142). As Eleanor falls more into the child role, putting herself under the care of
Hill House’s maternal presence, the haunted space becomes more welcoming to her—
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and, by extension, she is freed from the worries that previously plagued her. Like the
children who had previously inhabited the house, Eleanor is at ease within this space.
However, the maternal haunting in the house also causes Eleanor to reexperience
her past with her mother. There are moments when Eleanor seems to be doubly haunted,
such as when she hears the knocking outside of her room and must remind herself that “it
is a noise down the hall, far down at the end, near the nursery door, and terribly cold, not
[her] mother knocking on the wall” (Jackson 78, emphasis original). Eleanor is haunted
both by the maternal presence of Hill House, and also by the past she has repressed with
her mother. When she hears the knocking on the wall, this is not the first time she has
experienced such a thing. We learn that this was something her mother used to do,
something she had done before she died, and something Eleanor feels guilty about
ignoring, with Eleanor telling Theodora:
It was my fault my mother died […] She knocked on the wall and called me and
called me and I never woke up. I ought to have brought her the medicine; I always
did before. But this time she called me and I never woke up […] I’ve wondered
ever since if I did wake up. If I did wake up and hear her, and if I just went back
to sleep. (131-132)
Eleanor, who has repressed these feelings in the wake of her mother’s death, is
reexperiencing the knocking of her mother within Hill House, furthering the cyclical
nature of the relationships among women that are perpetuated by the house. It is not just
the fact of this cyclicality that is significant. It is a specific kind of relationship that
repeats within Hill House: the toxic relationship between a smothering mother and child.
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As the protagonist of Jackson’s novel and the character from whose perspective
the novel unfolds, it is no surprise that scholars have often chosen to focus their attention
on Eleanor, repeatedly calling into question whether Hill House’s haunting exists outside
of Eleanor’s mind. From the beginning, Jackson highlights Eleanor’s strained relationship
with both her deceased mother and her sister. Early in the novel, we learn of Eleanor’s
hatred and resentment toward her sister and dead mother, finding that:
[Eleanor spent] eleven years […] caring for her invalid mother, which had left her
with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without
blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her
years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small
reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to
become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it
was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-
consciousness and an awkward inability to find words. (3)
While her sister has been able to live on her own with her husband and child, Eleanor has
been tasked with taking care of her mother, unable to fully develop into adulthood as an
independent individual. She is, in essence, her mother's keeper and feels immense, if not
conflicting, guilt in the wake of her mother's death. Despite this, we learn that Eleanor
has ambitions of experiencing something bigger than what she has known all her life.
Thus, she jumps at the chance to branch out on her own and accepts Dr. Montague’s
invitation to join him at Hill House for the summer despite her sister's protests.
Rather than acting as a malevolent force, Hill House attempts to give its
inhabitants what they desire. She gives Eleanor what she wants, in some ways. This act of
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servitude characterizes Hill House as a feminine space according to social concepts of
femininity. At the end of the novel, just before Eleanor kills herself, she circles back to
the life she imagines for herself while driving to Hill House at the beginning of the novel.
As she is driving her car toward the tree in front of Hill House, she thinks to herself:
Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and
then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a
fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have
stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective
barrier, the spell broken? […] I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions
guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits,
weeping, for the princess to return. […] And we shall live happily ever after. (11)
The image of the oleanders and stone lions directly links this image to her fantasy at the
beginning of the novel, but her arrival—or rather, return—to this imagined place takes on
new meaning, because this place and the “queen” who welcomes her home is Hill House
and the maternal presence within (11). In this way, Hill House has become what Eleanor
always wanted for herself, thus fulfilling her desires, and feeding into this nurturing,
feminine characterization of Hill House.
For Eleanor, who is facing an internal struggle when she arrives at Hill House—
in particular, struggling with a sense of placelessness, and her complicated and often
antagonistic relationship with her mother—the haunted feminine and maternal presence
of Hill House allows her to connect with something beyond herself, further fulfilling her
desires. Thus, Eleanor is a prime candidate for the reception of Hill House’s maternal
presence. Eleanor longs for connection, adventure, and the freedom to explore the
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boundaries of her own identity, and she finds this within Hill House. One of the ways that
this limited freedom Eleanor experiences within Hill House are explored is through her
sexuality. The queer-coded relationship between Eleanor and Theodora that is explored
throughout the novel is made possible by Hill House. As Kahane notes, “compelled
ostensibly by the house to share the same bed, the same room, the same clothes as
Theodora, Eleanor both fears and delights in their confusion of identity” (Kahane 341-
342). Her friendship with Theodora is wrought with the intimacy of their closeness that
Hill House has pushed upon them by making Theodora’s room uninhabitable. This
element of sexuality and intimacy is something that Eleanor has never had the freedom to
explore on her own. However, within the confines of Hill House, she is encouraged to do
so, something Eleanor finds thrilling despite the volatility of their homosocial
relationship. In fact, this alternation between Theodora’s affection and rejection is the
only way Eleanor has ever experienced closeness with another person and the only way
she knows to understand a close relationship. This pattern of dependency and rejection is
the same pattern Eleanor experiences with her mother, again highlighting the cyclicality
of the toxic relationships encouraged by Hill House’s haunting.
Despite Eleanor’s ability to explore herself within Hill House, the maternal
presence of Hill House ensures that this freedom does not extend beyond the house. The
underdevelopment of Eleanor’s identity because of her dependent relationship with her
mother also leaves Eleanor open to Hill House’s smothering version of protection. The
relationship between Eleanor and Hill House is symbiotic. Within Hill House, Eleanor is
given the chance to develop as an individual and discover herself finally. Consequently,
Eleanor’s dwelling in this space allows Hill House to fulfill the role of the mother and
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protect a child within. This symbiosis shows how the smothering mother created by Hill
House’s patriarchal construction also stunts and confines women, resulting in Eleanor’s
regression into childhood and her eventual death. While Eleanor believes that she is
supposed to go out and find her own “cup of stars,” the smothering nature of Hill house’s
maternal presence cannot allow this to happen. Due to her inability to develop as an
individual, Eleanor is at risk in the patriarchal world outside of the house, and Hill House
will not let her leave the safety of its walls. Furthermore, due to her continued
infantilization within this haunted space, Eleanor does not want to leave. Thus, as with
Rebecca, Hill House’s power comes from a parasitic relationship between female power
and the patriarchy. The smothering power of Hill House depends on the patriarchy’s
warped angles and the dangers of the outside world for its power and control over the
women within. The dangers of the outside world are what cause women to seek refuge
within, allowing Hill House to act as the nurturing and smothering mother figure.
Because of its past experiences, Hill House thinks that the entire outside world is
dangerous for women because of the trauma it experienced at the hands of Hugh Crain
and because of the death of his first wife. Death is supposed to protect Eleanor from
going back to the patriarchal world. However, as Kahane notes, Eleanor’s choice to
“commi[t] herself […] to the maternal space as one of the ghosts of Hill House, now
forever incorporated into its powerful history” hinges on her own self destruction (342).
While haunting helps to create this female community within the novel, it comes at the
cost of women’s lives. Therefore, despite trying to protect women from the dangers of the
outside world, the smothering motherhood that Hill House engages in is, in some ways,
equally as harmful and confining, thus upholding the very patriarchal structures that it
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intends to protect against. Thus, the community among women created by haunted is not
a positive one, even if Eleanor feels that it is. In The Haunting of Hill House, haunting
allows Eleanor a limited, smothering kind of freedom. She is free to explore herself,
within the confines of Hill House. She may have relationships with other women, but
they are the same toxic relationships that have been repeated in the past. Hill House is
stuck in a toxic cycle, and its haunting ultimately takes Eleanor’s autonomy from her and
confines her to a childlike, codependent state with the mother figure she has never been
able to fully separate from.
Circular Structures
The circular structure of Hill House, alongside the cyclical relationships among
women, further emphasizes the irresolution within the novel. At the end of the novel,
after Eleanor’s apparent death, Jackson circles back to the novel’s opening lines:
Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had
stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its 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 (154).
The repetition of these lines adds to the reader’s sense that nothing with Hill
House is quite resolved. The haunting of Hill House, though witnessed throughout the
novel, remains largely unexplained and seems to have no end in sight. This irresolution
serves not only to demonstrate the power of Hill House, but this cyclical structure also
reinforces the idea that what has happened to Eleanor has happened before and will
happen again. She is not the first woman to fall victim to Hill House’s smothering
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protection from the patriarchal world that lies beyond its gates, nor will she be the last.
As with Rebecca, there is no real sense of resolution at the end of the novel. Whereas
Manderley is destroyed, Hill House remains standing at the end of the novel, and Jackson
writes: “it had stood […] for eighty years and might stand for eighty more” (154). The
cycles of trauma and toxicity inflicted of women’s struggles to exist in a patriarchal
world will continue on in Hill House for as long as it stands at its warped angles. Hill
House ends the way it begins, by showing the circularity of time and giving the reader the
sense that the things that have happened there will keep happening and that Hill House
will always be haunted by its troubled past.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the construction of Hill House and the history of the women who
lived there are integral to understanding what makes Hill House tick. The maternal
presence within Hill House results from the trauma it has endured and witnessed at the
hands of Hugh Crain and the broader patriarchal world outside. Thus, Hill House’s
smothering and infantilization of Eleanor is not only a result of Hill House’s power to
haunt, but also of its misconstrued attempts to protect women from the dangers of the
outside world. These attempts to protect and infantilize Eleanor occur in tandem with
Eleanor’s experiences of self-exploration within the limited freedoms of Hill House, but
the toxic and dependent mother-child relationship that becomes cyclical within Hill
House prevents Eleanor from exploring these freedoms in the outside world.
Eleanor’s inability and reluctance to break free from Hill House highlights the
catch-22 of the novel: the toxic relationship between Eleanor and Hill House serves to
uphold the very same patriarchal power structures and patterns of trauma that Hill House
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is trying to protect Eleanor from, and this unfortunate cycle will continue for as long as
Hill House remains standing. Thus, the “something-to-be-done” is once again absent
from The Haunting of Hill House’s depiction of haunting, with the cyclical nature of time
in the novel leaving the issues of the past unchanged at the novel’s conclusion and giving
the reader the sense that Eleanor will not be the last women to fall into a toxic
relationship with Hill House’s smothering version of motherhood.
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CHAPTER IV
IN MEMORIAM: CONFRONTING THE GHOSTS OF
EXPLOITATION IN SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA’S MEXICAN
GOTHIC
Introduction
When we think of haunted spaces in literature, we often imagine frightening
ghosts, secret passages, and, most likely, a sense of terror. Often, haunted spaces are
things to be feared, but Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel, Mexican Gothic, reimagines
the haunted space, or the “gloom” as a place of healing, where the traumas of the past are
brought into the present and forced to be confronted. Moreno-Garcia’s novel explores the
history of sexual exploitation experienced by the women within the Doyle family through
the eyes of Noemí, a young Mexican woman visiting the Doyle’s estate, High Place.
Moreno-Garcia uses haunting as a means of confronting the horrors of the past that the
family has swept under the rug and forgotten, using the supernatural fungus that makes
Mexican Gothic’s haunting possible to “infect” the Doyle estate with these memories. I
will explore how Mexican’s haunting is born from women’s trauma and exploitation at
the hands of patriarchal forces, and how the ghosts of exploitation utilize the gloom as a
space of memory and community. Thus, haunting acts as tool of subversion and a means
of confronting the horrors of the past that the family has swept under the rug. In Mexican
Gothic, the ghosts of sexual abuse refuse to be ignored. By forcing the past to be
confronted, the ghosts of Mexican Gothic can seek the acknowledgment of and
retribution for their suffering that was denied to them in life.
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Despite the recent interest in spatial studies within the Gothic, only a select few
scholars have focused their attention on haunted houses and the broader concepts of
haunted space, and since its release in 2020, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican
Gothic has yet to receive attention from literary critics. However, by reading Moreno-
Garcia’s novel in relation to feminist studies, we may read haunting as a manifestation of
women’s pain and will demonstrate how haunting in literature may be utilized to
memorialize and empower victims through community. In her work on Stephen King,
Rebecca Jackiner suggests that the literary haunted house helps one work through past
traumas by enabling the protagonist to understand how the past affects the present (193).
Haunting may be read not only as a supernatural manifestation of women's pain, but also
as a means of healing from that pain. The realization of trauma within the novel makes it
possible for women to join forces against the patriarchy in Mexican Gothic in ways that
are not possible in Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House. While there is trauma
present in each of the novels discussed here, it is only in Mexican Gothic that it is
acknowledged as such—and in which women are united against a patriarchal force, rather
than repeating the toxic female relationships of the past.
In my discussion of Moreno-Garcia’s novel, I will expand on Jackiner’s
discussion by demonstrating how the liminality of the haunted space within the novel—
that is, the ability to cross the boundaries between past, present, living, and dead—allows
the first wife, Agnes, and Ruth to reconcile the traumas of their past and allows Noemí to
cope with and overcome the horrors of the present. Magdalena Waligórska has previously
explored the use of haunting as a means of coping with past traumas. Waligórska’s
research suggests that haunting “enables the impossible” confrontation of the past, and
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that “ghost fiction in which gestures toward easing the pain of victims [...] offers a form
of closure for […] readers that, even if based on an imagined encounter, opens a space to
speak about past injustice and ponder on the possibilities of retribution and
reconciliation” (Waligórska 216-217). Essentially, Waligórska tells us that one way to
begin to heal from the traumas of the past is to have those wrongs acknowledged in the
present. Haunting, in literature, begins this work of healing by ensuring that the
experiences of the departed are not forgotten. I use the conclusion of Waligórska’s
research as a starting point for my discussion; if, as Waligórska argues, haunting can be
employed as a way of reconciling the traumas of our past, how might Moreno-Garcia’s
conception of the haunting allow the women of High Place to grapple with and overcome
generations of sexual abuse and domestic violence?
By creating a haunted space in which the history of the past and the realities of the
present may coexist, Moreno-Garcia works toward resolving the history of sexual
exploitation experienced by the women within the Doyle family at High Place. The
haunted spaces in the novel give voice to and memorialize women’s trauma through
supernatural manifestations of female ancestors and the interconnection of the haunted
house and the female body. Throughout this chapter, I will explore how the pain of
exploitation throughout the novel leads to High Place’s haunting and argue that this
haunted space acts as both a site of memorial and a venue for the subversion of
patriarchal control. Ultimately, the final chapter of “Haunted Women” will demonstrate
how the haunted space of Mexican Gothic is one of feminine power, allowing women to
heal from and overcome the traumas of the past through community and memory within
the haunted space.
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What is Haunting High Place?
One of the first questions we must confront regarding Moreno-Garcia’s novel is
this: What is it, exactly, that is haunting High Place? The answer to this, however, is
complicated. I have chosen the phrase “ghosts of exploitation” to describe the presence
haunting High Place, but the ghosts in Mexican Gothic take many forms. There are the
literal ghosts, of course, that present themselves to Noemí throughout the novel by way of
visions in the Gloom, such as the first wife, Agnes, and Ruth, offering us the classic
supernatural tropes we’ve come to expect in the Gothic and allowing for a direct,
physical confrontation with the past. Then, there are the ghosts that we do not see, the
ones that confine their haunting to the edge of the page—the continued impacts and
lingering trauma of generations of incestuous sexual abuse. I choose the term “ghosts of
exploitation” because the phrase effectively captures both kinds of ghosts that we must
grapple with throughout the novel, in which the effects of patriarchal exploitation of
women are rampant.
Mexican Gothic offers two explanations for High Place’s haunting, which support
our framework for understanding haunting and trauma. When Noemí visits Marta Duval,
a local healer in El Triunfo, Marta suggests that the source of High Place’s haunting is
mal de aire, a feature of Mexican folklore literally translating to “bad air,” which she
explains as “[a place] where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down”
(Moreno-Garcia 131). Marta tells Noemí that “the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll
nestle there and weigh you down” (Moreno-Garcia 131). In essence, Marta suggests that
High Place’s haunting is a result of a lingering evil that has made its mark on High Place
and effects all who go there. An alternative, but not entirely separate, view of High
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Place’s haunting is provided by Francis, who explains that: “The fungus, it runs under the
house, all the way to the cemetery and back. It’s in the walls. Like a giant spider’s web.
In that web we can preserve memories, thoughts, caught like the flies that wander into a
real web. We call that repository of our thoughts, of our memories, the gloom” (Moreno-
Garcia 211). Francis suggests that it is the supernatural fungus that is to blame for High
Place’s haunted state, this pointing toward a physical, material cause of haunting. This
material form of haunting in the novel, the fungus, is, quite literally, infecting High Place
and Howard. The power that he has stolen from the land and abused is the source of his
demise, and this is also a way of forcing what Howard fears most upon him. He can no
longer procreate within his family and maintain his perceived “superiority,” and despite
his best efforts to keep High Place as a British place, the supernatural elements of
Mexican culture and the landscape have infiltrated his home through the fungus. Another
result of the fungus acting as a material form of haunting is the forced hybridization of
the Doyle family and the Mexican landscape. From the novel, one learns that Howard has
been actively avoiding contact with the locals, choosing to marry within the family to
maintain the purity of the Doyle bloodline, and even importing their own soil from
England in order to maintain their distinctly British presence in Mexico. However, the
supernatural forces at work within the novel allow haunting to act as a sort of revenge on
behalf of postcolonial Mexico. In a letter from the author at the novel’s conclusion, Silvia
Moreno-Garcia writes, “It might sound a bit odd for a book titled Mexican Gothic to
actually take place in a town that was modeled on a British town and exploited by British
forces. Yet that’s part of the ironic legacy of Latin America” (302). The irony of
Howard’s stolen power ultimately becoming a memorial for all the pain and suffering he
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has caused to those he exploited in the name of power, then, follows the “ironic legacy”
Moreno-Garcia alludes to.
We may think of High Place’s haunting as a combination of the various
explanations offered in the novel. While the fungus may be primarily responsible for
High Place’s haunting, the fungus also connects three distinct points: women, the house,
and the Mexican landscape. Furthermore, one learns that the fungus sprouts from the
bodies of impregnated women, and that this has resulted in generations of incest and
sexual abuse for the women of High Place. The most prominent example of the fungus’
interconnection is found with Agnes, whose assault and death lead to the “birth” of the
Gloom in High Place. When Noemí witnesses Agnes’ death through a vision, she notes
that upon Agnes’ body being thrown into a pit beneath the foundations of High Place,
“the fungus would erupt up, from her body, up through the soil, weaving itself into the
walls, extending itself into the foundations of [High Place]” (Moreno-Garcia 218). Later,
when Noemí discovers Agnes’ body beneath the house, she states:
All the ghosts were Agnes. Or rather, all the ghosts lived inside Agnes. No, that
wasn’t right either. What had once been Agnes had become the gloom, and inside
the gloom there lived ghosts. It was maddening. It was not a haunting. It was
possession and not even that, but something she couldn’t even begin to describe.
The creation of an afterlife, furnished with the marrow and the bones and the
neurons of a woman, made of stems and spores. (Moreno-Garcia 284)
Effectively, this vision of Agnes’ death and the discovery of her body demonstrates how
women’s bodies, the landscape of Mexico, and High Place have all become connected
through the Gloom, and work in tandem to create the haunted space. There is little
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distinction to be made between the gloom and Agnes herself, though even this description
of the haunted space fails to account for the contributions of the first wife and Ruth to the
existence of the gloom. Therefore, while the fungus may offer a pseudo-scientific
explanation for High Place’s haunting, it is also deeply rooted in a history of exploitation
and suffering.
It follows, then, that the ghosts of High Place are the ghosts of the exploited, those
who have been affected by Howard Doyle’s patriarchal ways. Anne McClintock suggests
that “ghosts represent the irruption into the present of an unresolved past […] marking
places of irresolution, particularly in the adjudication of property, territory, power, and
justice: unsolved murders, untimely deaths, illegitimate transfers of power or property,
disrupted legacies, enacted as traumas of injustice” (McClintock 827). Following
McClintock’s argument, one finds that the ghosts of exploitation in Mexican Gothic are
representative of a history of patriarchal practices that have yet to be resolved within the
Doyle family.
The First Wife
I refer to Mexican Gothic’s first ghost of exploitation as the “first wife”, though
she remains unnamed throughout the novel, and argue that it is from the first wife’s
suffering that the novel’s haunting is born. The first wife belongs to group of indigenous
people who originally discovered the powers of the fungus, and “used the fungus to heal
their wounds and preserve their health” (Moreno-Garcia 206). Howard marries the first
wife in order to learn more about the fungus and heal from his own illness but is
dissatisfied with using it merely for its healing qualities and intends to steal it for his own
power. In Noemí’s vision, she notes that “[Howard] needed them. Needed to be accepted,
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needed to be one with these rough folk. For only then could he know all their secrets”
(Moreno-Garcia 206). For Howard, his marriage to his first wife is merely a means to an
end. Through her—and more specifically, his rape and impregnation of her—he will be
able to learn the secrets of her people and steal the fungus from them, using it to grant
himself immortality. In this way, the female body is colonized and stripped of its
resources in tandem with the landscape of Mexico, and the broader issues of colonialism
become mapped on the female body within the novel. Because it is the first wife’s
suffering—her rape and the murder of her people—that enables the Doyle’s to access the
supernatural fungus that will later create the gloom within High Place, haunting within
the novel is inexorably tied to the traumas of the past. Going back to Marta Duval’s
suggestion that High Place’s haunting is a result of mal de aire, one may think of High
Place as being “weighed down” by the sins of the Doyle’s past. If this is the case, then
certainly the first wife’s suffering is a part of the horrific past that weighs heavy in the air
of High Place.
However, despite being born from women’s trauma, the gloom-visions Noemí
receives of the first wife demonstrate how the gloom works in favor of the exploited by
acting as a repository of memory. Much like the “unmarked graves for the local workers
and with no gravestone to their name” where Noemí notes that “there could be no crowns
of flowers for them,” the first wife is yet another victim of the Doyle’s’ exploitative,
colonial presence in Mexico (Moreno-Garcia 150-151). Howard has allowed the first
wife to be forgotten entirely, effectively hiding the sins of his past from the living.
Indeed, the only reason Noemí becomes aware of the first wife’s existence and how her
suffering has influenced the present is through the visions she receives through the
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gloom. In her gloom-vision, Noemí sees the first wife “In the corner of the cave […] Her
hair was stringy, her face plain and pasty. She held a shawl around her shoulders with a
bony hand and looked at Doyle with interest” (Moreno-Garcia 205). Even in Noemí’s
gloom-vision, the first wife is hidden in the shadows. Her appearance portrays her
fragility, and though Noemí does not yet know what the first wife has and will endure(d),
she notes that she “felt [Howard’s] disgust as he touched the woman” (Moreno-Garcia
206). When the first wife’s people are slaughtered by Howard and her home is burned,
Noemí describes the woman as “numb and afraid” as she is taken away by Howard, who
notes that “She was now frightfully ugly, with her belly grown and her eyes dull. But she
was necessary” (Moreno-Garcia 207). Though the first wife is only briefly seen in the
novel, she is described as a woman who is alone and afraid and lacks the agency to stand
against Howard’s exploitation. However, by memorializing her traumas through the
gloom, the novel ensures that the injustices that she and her people endured are not
forgotten. If, as Waligórska argues, ensuring the past is not forgotten is an important step
in healing from trauma, then the memorialization of the first wife through haunting and
the opportunity Noemí’s gloom-visions provide to encounter the traumas the first wife
suffered directly suggests that haunting in Mexican Gothic is working on behalf of the
exploited, and might be read as a way of giving the first wife justice for what she has
endured.
Agnes
The connection between Agnes and High Place is representative of the effects of
patriarchal oppression in the home. In Noemí’s gloom-visions, Noemí learns that Agnes
and her sister, Alice, take note of their brother’s strange behavior after he returns with the
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first wife, and notes that “there were so many questions to ask, but he wouldn’t let them
speak” (Moreno-Garcia 207). Agnes’ concerns and fears for her and her sister’s safety are
continually silenced by Howard, whom she fears to be “evil” (Moreno-Garcia 207-208).
Like the first wife, Agnes lacks the agency or power to resist Howard’s will and is forced
to endure her exploitation in silence when she is impregnated by him. However, while the
first wife’s suffering runs parallel to the broader issues of colonialism, Agnes’ suffering
is representative of the longsuffering wife, who has feared Howard for years and is bound
to the home by family ties, which is the reason for Moreno-Garcia’s doubling of Agnes
and High Place.
While there is a literal connection between Agnes and the house because her body
is placed in the house's foundations, she is also bound to the domestic space where she
lived, walking in the shadows and enduring Howard’s assaults behind closed doors.
Recent scholarship focusing on the literary haunted house points to the tendency to
personify the haunted house to build tension within the narrative (Pugliese 301). Even
outside of literature, it is not uncommon to see the house assigned a sense of humanity; as
Gaston Bachelard imagines in The Poetics of Space, the home acts as “the topography of
our inner being” (Bachelard xxxvi). While the humanized haunted house is often
employed to draw parallels between the home and its inhabitants, Mexican Gothic pushes
the boundaries of this imagined connection by literalizing it. The most prominent
instance of the interconnection is found with Agnes, whose assault and death lead to the
“birth” of the gloom in High Place. When Noemí witnesses Agnes’ death through a
vision, she notes that upon Agnes’ body being thrown into a pit beneath the foundations
of High Place, “the fungus would erupt up, from her body, up through the soil, weaving
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itself into the walls, extending itself into the foundations of [High Place]” (Moreno-
Garcia 218). From this, we can recognize three distinctly interconnected points: High
Place, Agnes, a fungus with seemingly supernatural qualities. When these three separate
entities are combined, what we are presented with is the gloom, a haunted space.
However, it is not just important that we recognize that both Agnes and High
Place act at the foundation of this haunted space, but also that we recognize the doubling
of Agnes and the house. When Noemí sees Agnes in spectral form, manifested through
the gloom, she finds that “where her face ought to have been there was a glow, golden
like that of the mushrooms on the wall. […] Next to Noemí the wall had started to quiver,
beating to the same rhythm as the golden woman. Beneath her the floorboards pulsed too;
a heart, alive and knowing” (Moreno-Garcia 56). Noemí’s vision suggests that the
connection between Agnes, the house, and the gloom is not merely symbolic, but also
physical. In the haunted space of the gloom, Agnes and High Place have merged.
Perhaps Agnes is the house, or perhaps the liminality of the gloom has allowed the
boundaries of identity to blur. The merging of women and the home, even a haunted one,
feminizes the haunted space and demonstrates how Agnes’ trauma has helped to shape
the haunting of High Place.
Ruth
Ruth, Howard’s daughter from his third wife, demonstrates how haunting, despite
being born from trauma, can also create a space of empowerment and protection. The
source of Ruth’s traumas, one learns from the stories told by her family and Marta Duval,
is the loss of her fiancée, Benito, and her forced marriage to her cousin, Michael. Marta
reveals that Benito disappeared under mysterious circumstances and that Howard was
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likely to blame for this (Moreno-Garcia 130). Furthermore, Noemí’s discovery of the
books on eugenics in High Place may give further insight into the source of Ruth’s pain.
One of the books she encounters is Hereditary Descent by O.S. Fowler. While Mexican
Gothic only references the main title, the book Noemí finds is a real book, subtitled “its
laws and facts, illustrated and applied to the improvement of mankind: with hints to
woman; including directions for forming matrimonial alliances so as to produce, in
offspring, whatever physical, mental, or moral qualities may be desired: together with
preventives of hereditary tendencies.” Based on this discovery, one concludes that
Howard is particularly concerned with Ruth’s prospective marriage to someone he
believes will produce “inferior” offspring. One may think of Ruth as a secondary victim
of the patriarchal attitudes that surround her, and as an example of what happens when
one tries to oppose these systems of power. Throughout the novel, Ruth is spoken of as a
kind of horror story; a privileged young woman who has seemingly snapped, killing
several members of her family before committing suicide. Ruth is a prime example of
how memory can become skewed when the past is filtered through patriarchal forces, and
how misremembering can be viewed as an injustice for the victims of traumas. When
Noemí sees photographs of Ruth, however, she notes that “the woman in the photograph
seemed merely discontent, not murderous” (Moreno-Garcia 107). Here, one begins to see
that Ruth is not murderous—or any of the number of words used to describe women’s
emotions, such as “crazy” or “hysterical.” Rather, Noemí suggests that Ruth was
experiencing some kind of unhappiness in her life that has gone overlooked by others.
In death, Ruth continues to resist Howard’s patriarchal power through haunting,
and ultimately succeeds. Through haunting, Ruth is given the opportunity to help Noemí
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succeed where she had failed, to protect her, and ultimately, to put a stop to the
exploitation that had caused so much pain, thus demonstrating haunting’s ability to act as
a tool of subversion. Through haunting, the dead women of High Place are able to
reclaim their agency and offer protection and guidance for the living women of High
Place. While we are initially presented with the haunting of High Place as something to
be feared, we quickly learn that the living beings that inhabit the home are much more
dangerous. We can see this through Ruth’s protection of Noemí from the sexual advances
of the Doyle men. One instance of this occurs when Noemí has a vision that she is being
sexually assaulted by Howard and Virgil while she sleeps, witnessing the assault as an
out-of-body experience (Moreno-Garcia 80). Noemí notes that “behind her she felt a
presence, felt it like one feels a cold spot in a house, and the presence had a voice; it
leaned close to her ear and it whispered. “Open your eyes,” the voice said, a woman’s
voice” (Moreno-Garcia 80). We learn that the voice she hears is Ruth’s, Howard’s late
daughter, who, as the novel implies, has experienced similar assaults. Here, the liminal
haunted space has allowed Ruth to connect with Noemí, breaching the boundaries
between life and death. In doing so, the haunted space further promotes Ruth’s healing
from the traumas of her past and promotes her agency. While the dead women within the
novel have the power to control or prevent what has happened to them in the past, the
haunted space grants them the power to enlighten and protect other women so that they
do not suffer the same fate.
Memory & Community
Haunting acts as a means of reconciling the traumas experienced by the exploited
by acting as a space of memory and forming a community of women within the novel.
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While the first wife died alone and afraid, the community and memorialization offered by
haunting within the novel ensure that the other women exploited by the Doyle’s are not
subjected to the same fate. Throughout the novel, the readers, alongside Noemí, bear
witness to the acts of violence and traumas faced by the women of High Place through
her gloom-visions. Jackiner suggests that through haunting, the haunted space “has the
potential for exhuming and dealing with [traumatic] events by allowing one protagonist
to personally encounter past events and how they have shaped the present” (Jackiner
193). For something to be exhumed, it is implied that it has once been buried—or, as
Gordon’s framework describes, repressed. The burial or repression of the past is
commonplace in Mexican Gothic, particularly when it comes to women. As Noemí
remarks, “things were never spoken at High Place, not even now” (Moreno-Garcia 296).
Thus, there is a repression of the past that keeps with the traditional conventions of the
Gothic mode. The secrets of the past— in this case, the violence and sexual abuse that the
women of High Place have been suffering for generations—must be revealed, or
exhumed, by the protagonist, Noemí, throughout the course of the novel. By “exhuming”
their traumas and allowing Noemí to bear witness to the first wife, Agnes, and Ruth’s
suffering, the haunted space ensures that they cannot be forgotten, and their memory
cannot be erased. Because of haunting, the dead women of High Place who would
otherwise become a part of a buried past are ever-present within the home and in the
minds of the women who live there.
For example, not only is Agnes’ body hidden away beneath the house, but her life
and experiences are seemingly buried with her, because the Doyles are able to choose
what aspects of her to memorialize through portraits and gravestones. Effectively, this
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means that the Doyle’s can also revise their personal history. While the first wife risks
being forgotten entirely, Agnes is at a greater risk of being misremembered. Following
the cliché, “history is written by the victors,” history in Mexican Gothic is largely written
by the Doyles, leaving those who have been exploited unable to share their side of the
story and effectively rendering them voiceless, reflecting the issues of popular narratives
of history previously pointed out by Kosmina (906). However, the haunting in Moreno-
Garcia’s novel allows us to view this history from both sides. Recalling what I have
previously mentioned in Magdalena Waligórska’s work, by acting as a memorial for
female trauma, the haunted space moves toward a place of healing and closure that
“opens a space to speak about past injustice and ponder on the possibilities of retribution
and reconciliation” (Waligórska 217). Simply by forcing the remembrance and
acknowledgment of this trauma and allowing the departed to speak their truth, the
haunted space allows us to begin reconciling the traumas of the past. In the “real” world
of Mexican Gothic, history is always told through the lens of the patriarchy, but within
the gloom, the visions Noemí receives from the dead become another way of preserving
and sharing memory. Thus, the memorialization of women’s trauma within the gloom
and the gloom-visons allow history to be passed from one generation of women to the
next. This provides Noemí with a view of history that is unfiltered by the patriarchal
forces at work in the novel, and this collective memory is made possible through
haunting.
Furthermore, through haunting, women in the novel, both dead and alive, are able
to make contact with one another, effectively forming a community of women through
the gloom. The gloom becomes a network for memorializing women and their trauma
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and preserves their collective memory for future generations of women, so haunting
becomes a way of communicating between past and present. Though male members of
the Doyle family seem to have access to the gloom’s power on some level, they do not
make contact with female ancestors the way that Noemí and Carolina are able to in their
gloom-visions. While the men in the novel use haunting and the fungus’ supernatural
powers to control and subjugate others, women in the novel use haunting as a way of
building a community, protecting one another, and subverting men’s power within the
home. Donna Fancourt argues that women’s shifts in consciousness are often due to
visions, thus pointing to the “vision” as a common source of subversion in literature. In
this case, gloom-visions act as the voice of the oppressed, communicated directly to
Noemí, thus bringing the living women of High Place into the community within the
gloom. While Howard and Virgil, his son, are also able to access the gloom to a certain
extent, the gloom acts primarily as a space of communion for the women of the novel, as
the men are seemingly unaware of the interactions between the dead and living women of
High Place. Visions communicated through the gloom become a kind of secret language
for women within the novel, one that flies under the radar of the men in the home.
Therefore, the community formed within the haunted space becomes another form of
subversion and agency that is provided through haunting, and haunting further allows for
the subversion of the patriarchal powers that control the home. This suggests that we
might view haunting as a product of necessity—it is the only way to protect women from
Howard’s control.
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The Burning House & Lessons from the Past
As with Rebecca’s Manderley, Mexican Gothic concludes with the burning of
High Place. The burning of the estate, via the burning of Agnes, allows Noemí to break
the cycle of abuse that has been perpetuated within this space. In doing so, she also frees
Agnes from the prolonged torture she has endured by keeping the gloom alive. It is only
by destroying the house, the gloom, and the Doyle family that Agnes may finally be put
to rest. Unlike Rebecca’s Manderley, when High Place is destroyed, it is not to burn away
the past or preserve problematic systems of power, but rather destroying these systems. It
is Noemí, rather than an antagonist, who sets fire to High Place, exercising the agency
and insight she has gained from her gloom-visions in order to free Agnes from her
enduring torture as the mother of the gloom. The destruction of High Place, however,
does not erase Agnes’ suffering or the sins the Doyle’s have committed against the
Mexican people and landscape. Burning High Place is a reclamation of what has been
taken and justice for the suffering of the past. When High Place burns, Noemí, Catalina,
and Francis take what they have learned from the past with them, with no intention of
repressing that past, like we see with Rebecca’s narrator and Maxim when Manderley
burns. The shared memory of the past and wisdom found through haunting, and the
community of women in the gloom is what liberates them.
While noting the importance of memory, it is crucial to Moreno-Garcia’s broader
role in engaging with the past through haunting in Mexican Gothic. As I have previously
noted with Kosmina’s suggestion that marginalized groups must find new ways of
engaging with history in light of their being written out of it by white, patriarchal
society’s collective memory, Moreno-Garcia’s novel serves as a ghost of its own,
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reminding us of the effects of colonialism that continue to haunt Mexican landscapes and
culture. Colonialism, in this context, serves as the property issue commonly found in the
Gothic novel. The Doyles are claiming ownership of Mexican land. It is for this reason
that Moreno-Garcia’s novel, rather than manifesting haunting through intangible
supernatural forces, finds its roots in the soil—a fungus, born from the magic and decay
of the past., spreading throughout High Place and ultimately bringing about the
destruction of this monument to colonialism. By writing Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia
further ensures that the past is not forgotten. Speaking on behalf of the marginalized
groups that have been written out of history, Moreno-Garcia must create a new way of
engaging with the past and does so through haunting—manipulating conceptions of time
and what has come before in order to reveal a truth that remains repressed in the
present—the effects of European colonialism and patriarchal oppression continue to
haunt Mexico in modern society. Through the employment of haunting in the novel,
Moreno-Garcia allows us to see what has previously been forgotten, engaging with the
concepts of collective memory, and instills in us the “something-to-be-done” Gordon’s
framework points toward in hopes of honoring the past and creating a better future.
Conclusion
The issues of memory and community are at the heart of Mexican Gothic. In the
novel, haunting becomes a means of subverting the patriarchal powers that have
exploited the women of High Place. Ultimately, in Moreno-Garcia’s novel, the
exploitation of the first wife, Agnes, and Ruth helps to create the haunted space of the
gloom. Thus, haunting within the novel is deeply intertwined with women’s trauma and
suffering. Though the Doyles are content to selectively acknowledge and share the dark
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history of their family’s past, the ghosts of exploitation are memorialized through
haunting. The gloom-visions Noemí receives through the gloom repeatedly reveal the
abuses the family has attempted to sweep under the rug. Thus, the haunted space acts as a
repository of memory and space of community, allowing the women of High Place to
communicate with one another outside of Howard’s patriarchal control, promoting
female solidarity and empowerment by ensuring that the traumas of the past will not be
forgotten or inflicted upon future generations of women. In a home that has largely been
dominated by a controlling and overbearing patriarchal presence, women must find other
ways of speaking and sharing knowledge of the past. Unlike the frightening and
malevolent hauntings we might typically imagine when we think of haunted spaces in
literature, Mexican Gothic’s haunted spaces are ones of protection and healing. Moreno-
Garcia utilizes haunting to show that it is not the dead that should be feared in High
Place, but rather the living.
By exploring representations of haunting and gender in women’s Gothic novels,
“Haunted Women” has tried to establish an understanding of the relationship between
women and haunting, utilizing representations of time, memory, and gender to
understand the relationships among women of the past, present, and future. Though each
novel sees the formation of a community of women, it is only in Mexican Gothic that this
community of women unites itself against the patriarchy and displays true female
solidarity. This is due, in part, to Moreno-Garcia’s depiction of haunting as a tool of
subversion rather than a source of control or display of power. Noting Gordon’s defining
characteristics of haunting, it is the unique phenomenon of the “something-to-be-done”
that distinguishes haunting from trauma (Gordon xvii). Haunting speaks not only to the
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events of the past, but also helps to shape the future by forcing an action or
acknowledgment of what has been repressed in the present, which is why the outcome of
Mexican Gothic’s haunting is so different from Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House.
Ultimately, in Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House, haunting and the female
communities it forms are stuck in the same patterns of the past, unable to free themselves
from the hold and influence of the patriarchal society they live in. While the women in
these novels are connected to the women of the past, they learn nothing from them—the
haunting they experience lacks the “something-to-be-done” that is integral to Mexican
Gothic, driving Noemí to destroy the systems of power that have repressed and oppressed
women by burning down High Place and putting the ghosts of exploitation to rest. The
community of women connected by haunting in High Place, unlike that which is present
in Hill House or Manderley, compels us to learn from the past and break the cycles of
trauma for future generations of women, rather than submitting to or perpetuating them.
Texas Tech University, Kennedy McLeod, May 2023
72
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