"'There has to be a first time for everything,' Eleanor told herself": Delayed Adolescence and Parentification in The Haunting of Hill House

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• “‘There has to be a first time for everything,’ Eleanor told herself”: Delayed Adolescence and Parentification in The Haunting of Hill House
• Michael T. Wilson (bio)

In Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, of the three house guests Dr. Montague summons to take part in his “haunted house” experiment, Eleanor behaves most erratically, her emotions swinging from one extreme to another as she desperately seeks the one thing she cannot find—an autonomous adulthood in a place where she belongs—until her personality disintegrates into the House.¹ Eleanor’s behavior becomes much more understandable, however, when viewed as that of a young woman struggling through the delayed and parentified adolescence imposed upon her by a needy, domineering mother, a struggle continued and exacerbated by the matriarchal persona presented by Hugh Crain’s seemingly patriarchal creation, Hill House itself.

Nancy D. Chase’s “Parentification: An Overview of Theory, Research, and Societal Issues” usefully surveys current theory on parentification. In Chase’s words, “parentification [entails] a functional and/or emotional role reversal in which the child sacrifices his or her own needs for attention, comfort, and guidance in order to accommodate and care for logistic and emotional needs of the parent[,] [and] the parentified child may learn in this process that her needs are of less importance than those of others, or may actually become depleted of energy and time for pursuing school, friendships, childhood activities, and, at later stages, exploration of career and relationship possibilities.”² Although Eleanor can barely imagine an adult life, her attempt to reach it begins with her acceptance of Dr. Montague’s invitation to join his group: “During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill [End Page 223] House” (4). Eleanor’s long hope for a positive change in her life reflects the trauma that has been inflicted upon her, the “dire and tragic consequences” that Peter K. Smith links to parentification.³

The Haunting of Hill House is intensely concerned with parenting, although publishers often gloss over the fact. As the back cover of the first Penguin Classics edition informs the reader, “Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Luke, the adventurous future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past.”⁴ Eleanor’s “dark past” is simply her traumatized, parentified caring for her mother and a past report of poltergeist activity at their house, a phenomenon long associated with troubled adolescents. As Dr. Montague’s invited group of houseguests settles in, they form an informal family, foiling the history of Hugh Crain’s abusive parenting in the House. Apparently supernatural events begin to trouble their nights as Eleanor attempts to establish an adult identity for herself for the first time and her sanity unravels, while the House itself increasingly takes on the attributes of both Hugh Crain and an alternately nurturing and punitive maternality that evokes Eleanor’s memory of her mother.

Jackson’s depiction of Eleanor’s mother seems to reflect her view of her own mother Geraldine as well as 1950s scholarship on adolescent psychology. Joan Wylie Hall argues that Jackson fell from “a tolerable childhood into a pathological adolescence,” that her “mother determined the floor plan of her daughter’s self,” and that “Jackson’s compulsions were constructed on that design.”⁵ Karl C. Garrison, in his 1951 Psychology of Adolescence, notes that parental troubles rank “first among a list of symptoms” that “may take the extreme form of a sharp, emotional rejection of the child by a parent or both parents.”⁶ Eleanor’s own mother-dominated psychology is further framed by Garrison’s observation that “aggressive behavior and instability are related to an early life dominated by authoritarian control. When the father or mother was the dominating (authoritarian) force in the home, the children obeyed, but their lives were filled with tension and frustration.”⁷ Eleanor exhibits both aggressiveness (Laura Miller terms “one of her chief traits . . . a kind of...