The Object World Re-Enchanted: The Agency of Humans and Things in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall and The Haunting of Hill House
by Anna Joanna Bartnicka
Author Bio: Anna Joanna Bartnicka, a second year PhD student at the University of Wrocław, Poland, Faculty of Letters, Institute of English Studies, Department of American Literature and Culture. Her current research focuses on the works of Shirley Jackson, Gothic literature, and the depictions of object agency in arts.
Shirley Jackson’s debut novel The Road Through the Wall (1948) and her arguably most well-known work The Haunting of Hill House (1959) bothforeground houses, which the biographer Ruth Franklin calls “one of [Jackson’s] lifetime obsessions and the gravitational center of much of her fiction” (13). Visiting a house and observing its “behavior” constitutes the plot of the latter, while trespassing and breaking into a house becomes one of the catalysts of the shocking finale of the former. Alongside the houses themselves, there is an abundance of material objects of a smaller scale with whom the characters interact and through which they communicate, such as clothes, furniture, tableware, or toys. Objects, in the sense of commodity goods and cultural artefacts, are certainly a source of great interest in Jackson’s oeuvre and life in general, as shown in the recently published collection of her letters.
This is no surprise; the post-war period in American history during which Jackson created was a time of significant change in the production and consumption of commodities, which may be said to have increased human dependency on physical objects in daily life and, in turn, prompted further ethical questions about their relationship with humans and their specific way of being. Such ethical concerns may be said to have resulted in what is currently called the Non-Human Turn in humanities, one of whose aims is finding “new techniques, in speech and art, to disclose the participation of nonhumans” in our everyday life (Bennett, “Systems and Things” 225).
The aim of this article is to analyze Jackson’s novels as presenting two views of object agency and to point out the way in which she engages in the still ongoing and recently reinvigorated discussion about the material world. The novels will be examined in light of contemporary theories in the field of object studies, namely Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism and Bill Brown’s thing theory, as well as the Heideggerian thing-object dichotomy and the Latourian concept of the Modern Constitution. By using these analytical tools, it is possible to perceive the two novels as interrogating and resisting the modern assumption of the clearcut human-object binary and its impact on the treatment of things as well as humans. The article will conduct the analysis in an achronological manner, beginning with The Haunting of Hill House, which most fully develops Jackson’s interest in living things and whose conclusions will enable me to reconsider The Road Through the Wall in a new light. Hill House, being the most agentic of objects, provides the frame of reference through which to understand The Road as a steppingstone in Jackson’s search for object agency, a concern grounded in the problem of human agency.
In his 1991 work We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour understands modernity as the time in the history of human thought when not only were the tenets of humanism formulated, but also, and maybe more importantly, the “birth of ‘non-humanity’” took place (13). According to Latour, modernity is characterized by its insistence on separating all beings into the “two entirely distinct ontological zones” of humans and non-humans, society and nature, subjects and objects (We Have Never 11). This creates an artificial binary, which is propagated by a thought project called the Modern Constitution. It is the Modern Constitution, he claims, which demands that things be “purified” into discrete categories; in practice, however, such purification does not hold, producing instead large amounts of monstrous “hybrids” that exist in between categories, remain “invisible, unthinkable, unpresentable” and become “the unconscious of the moderns” (We Have Never 34, 37). A similar view is presented by the theorist Jane Bennett who opposes the separation of the world into the categories of “dull matter” and “vibrant life,” where materiality is understood to be passive, inert, and instrumentalized, whereas living organisms, especially humans, are defined by their agency and activity (Vibrant Matter xii-ix). Instead, Bennett creates the concept of “thing-power,” which emphasizes the capacity of non-human bodies to be catalysts of affects and active participants in the creation of reality, whether “[o]rganic or nonorganic,” “natural or cultural” (Vibrant Matter xii). What in Latour’s theory is called The Modern Constitution, in Bennett’s theory becomes “the story of the disenchantment of modernity” (Enchantment 4). Enchantment is a state of being pleasurably fascinated and simultaneously uncannily disrupted by the sensual objects surrounding us in the world otherwise assumed to be known beyond any possibility of surprise. Enchantment causes one to feel “torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition” and to experience “a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life” (Enchantment 5). By changing our disposition, we may see the world as enchanted again and experience its “vibrant materiality.”
The idea of the disruption of the usual patterns of perception is also crucial to Bill Brown’s conception of “thingness.” Like Latour and Bennett, Brown opposes the Cartesian mind-body binary and the instrumental understanding of objects as simply the carriers of information, whether scientific, cultural, or historical. Basing his Thing Theory on the foundation of Heideggerian philosophy (Being and Time; “The Thing”), Brown emphasizes the distinction between a thing and an object in his most well-known passage:
As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture—above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. … We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stills, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuit of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. (“Thing Theory” 4)
Only once an object breaks down, goes missing, is unknown to its user, or becomes an obstacle in the course of action, does it become “un-ready-to-hand.” “Un-readiness-to-hand” is one of the three modes of encountering an object proposed by Heidegger. This is different from “presence” (conscious analysis of an object in sciences and philosophy) and “readiness-to-hand” (unreflective, physical or symbolic use of an object for instrumental purposes) (Blattner). By becoming “un-ready-to-hand,” an object reveals itself to be a “thing,” something more than it is at the first glance. In doing so, it discloses new and unexpected “sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic” aspects of its being (Other Things 51). The encounter with an object in its state of “un-readiness-to-hand” is the moment when “thingness” erupts out of the “misuse value,” and the intensity of such experience unveils to us the autonomy and agency of objects as well as their inseparability from the subject. Thus, “subject” and “object” become artificial constructions. Art and literature have the capacity of expressing the thingness of objects and, as Brown encourages, literary analysis can have for its aim the search for “fragments of a counterhistory to the history of modernity, thus fragments of a prehistory of the current interest in the vitality of matter and object agency” (Other Things 306). It is the claim of this article that in her literary works Jackson actively participates in the formation of the “counterhistory” to the modern assumptions about the material, by problematizing the subject-object distinction and offering narratives specifically about the vibrancy of thingness.
Up until now, The Haunting of Hill House has been mostly analyzed through the lens of human relations which relegates the material objects, such as Hill House itself, to the role of mere carriers of socio-cultural meaning. To provide a few examples, Dale Bailey understands Hill House as “a metaphor for an oppressive patriarchal ideology” (28); Darryl Hattenhauer suggests looking at it “as a metaphor for the disunified subject” (155); and Tricia Lootens describes it as “reveal[ing] … a brutal, inexorable version of the ‘absolute reality’ … of nuclear families that kill where they are supposed to nurture” (151). Such analyses tend to pay less attention to what Hill House “says” about itself as a thing, and more to what it reveals about the interpersonal relations of the characters who relate to it as an object. The proposition of this article is to interpret the experience of “haunting” as the experience of the fundamental thingness, an encounter with the sensual, aesthetic, and affective agency and autonomy of material objects, which the characters try to repress and explain otherwise, and which constitutes the source of their fear. This understanding foregrounds the material vitality of Hill House, which in a Gothic fashion blurs such aforementioned established binary oppositions as culture and nature, subject and object, life and matter, thought and body, thus questioning the very basis of the modern anthropocentric way of thinking about the world. Hill House, therefore, is a thing, an object unready-to-hand, par excellence.
As we learn from the description of the creation of Hill House, it “seemed somehow to have formed itself … reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity” (32). It actively participated in its own formation, refusing to assume the exact shape which was designed for it, always distorting it and thus rebelling against and exposing the flaws of the creative powers of its human builders. As Eleanor notices, “the builders of the house had given up any attempt at style—probably after realizing what the house was going to be, whether they chose it or not” (35). This way, Hill House points to the problem with the common assumption modern subjects hold of having full control over matter in the processes of producing material culture, which, while not fully belonging to nature, becomes “a mixture of culture-nature … a matter out of place—part of the ‘excluded middle’” (Olsen 96). Not entirely separated from humans, material objects are not as easily malleable as might be thought, and matter always defines the final product of human hands. This way of presenting Hill House inspires us to look at the notion of agency from a new perspective, noticing that “things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid” certain physical actions, thus proving themselves to be agentic, just like human actants (Latour, Reassembling 72). What is more, the emphasis on Hill House’s participating in its own construction forbids the readers from assuming that the supernatural activity derives from prior human activity. Although we learn about the long history of Hill House and the “impressive list of tragedies connected to it” (73), Hill House has not become haunted; haunting constitutes its essential quality since “birth.” The novel thus presents what Bailey calls “the contemporary haunted house formula” where “the house itself is sentient and malign, independent of any ghosts which may be present” (6).
As a result of its unbearable physicality, Hill House defies the key practical use of a house: being the place of prolonged stay for humans. This is exemplified by the description of the rooms in which the characters gather in chapter three:
It had an unpleasantly high ceiling, and a narrow tiled fireplace which looked chill in spite of the fire which Luke had lighted at once; the chairs in which they sat were rounded and slippery, and the light coming through the colored beaded shades of the lamps sent shadows into the corners. (55)
This excerpt showcases the absurdly contradictory character of Hill House: the fireplace seems cold, the chairs are not a suitable place for sitting, and the lamp mainly creates shadows instead of light. Moreover, Hill House has such a complicated floor plan that it requires the characters to use a map and to practice moving around if they do not wish to get lost. It is impossible to leave the doors open, as they close of their own accord. It is productive, therefore, to apply to Hill House Brown’s conception of “a thing,” as opposed to “an object.” The house presents itself to its visitors in the mode of un-readiness-to-hand, as a broken tool which attracts attention through its lack of functionality, not allowing the humans to use it and thus ignore it. Because of its unpredictable behavior, Hill House remains impossible to control and domesticate, and so impossible to own like a typical physical property.Rather than an object, it seems like a subject, a protagonist among the human characters. It is never only them watching the house, but the house is a spectator capable of perception too: “The house. It watches your every move” (80). Hill House disturbs the clear division of human as subject (acting) and thing as object (acted upon): “Around them the house steadied and located them, above them the hills slept watchfully … and the center of consciousness was somehow the small space where they stood” (54).
At the beginning of the novel, Eleanor perceives Hill House as a symbol of death, emphasizing the presence of humans as the only source of life. Following Mrs. Dudley as she enters Hill House for the first time, Eleanor “followed, hurrying after anything else alive in this house” (35), accompanying Theodora, she “ran downstairs, moving with color and life against the dark woodwork and the clouded light of the stairs” (45). With time, however, this opposition (humans-house, life-death) becomes blurry and confuses the characters. As the plot unfolds, more objects inside the house acquire vitality, becoming undeniably similar to humans. Theodora notices that the “dining-room carpet … looks like a field of hay, and you can feel it tickling your ankles” (103), and that “a life-size statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel real skin” (104). The haunting which they experience at night resembles the behavior of animals and people: a dog running down the hall, writing on the walls, knocking on the doors, doorknobs being turned, and even whispers, laughs and giggles. Hill House is anthropomorphized in various parts of the novel: “The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of the cornice” (32). It has eyes, eyebrows, hands, and a stomach, inside of which Eleanor is enclosed like “a small creature swallowed whole by a monster” (39). In the last quote, noticeably, the house is likened to a cannibal, subverting the convention of anthropomorphism by implying the monstrosity of modern humans.
As soon as the characters arrive at Hill House, the place evokes in them feelings of unbelonging, discomfort, and animosity. The difficulty of comprehending this makes the house seem unreal to them, as if it did not physically exist: “Except for the wires which ran to the house from a spot among the trees, there was no evidence that Hill House belonged in any way to the rest of the world” (46). By not conforming to what the characters are accustomed to thinking about reality, Hill House disturbs them on an ontological level. Unable to accept the essential agency of Hill House, they insist on explaining the supernatural activities in two ways: through physical processes or the existence of ghosts. Dr Montague enumerates “subterranean waters, or electric currents, or hallucinations caused by polluted air; atmospheric pressure, sun spots, earth tremors” (66) as possible sources of Hill House’s behavior, turning to modern scientific methods of analysis and perceiving Hill House in its mode of “presence,” as an object of study. When he attempts to measure the temperature of the “heart of the house,” however, the thermometer refuses to function, and the sensation of coldness cannot be translated into numbers, remaining just what it is: a bodily sensation. Mrs. Montague opposes the “purely materialistic views” of her husband and looks for the explanation in the immaterial, “intangible beings” (177). She performs a séance in order to communicate with the ghost of a nun that supposedly died “walled up alive” (179) and who now haunts Hill House, using the house and the planchette as the carriers of her message (176). The novel, however, emphasizes that neither of these methods of inquiry are effective in reaching satisfying conclusions, as they are based on the wrong foundation: the denial of the agency and meaning of the thing itself.
Eleanor is the first of the characters to think of the actions of Hill House not as mindless, physical attacks, instead ascribing to the building a certain level of cognitive intentionality: “as though the house listened with attention to her words, understanding, cynically agreeing, content to wait” (124). In a similar manner, Eleanor perceives the coldness of the nursery: “It doesn’t seem like an impartial cold … I felt is as deliberate, as though something wanted to give me an unpleasant shock” (114). The conclusion such descriptions may lead to is that the house has the capacity not only to act, but also to feel (emotions such as irritation or amusement), and to plan its actions ahead of executing them. With the plot advancing, more and more abilities, usually assumed to belong to animals or humans only, are imputed to the house and the items inside of it, breaking the division between life and “inert matter” and becoming Jane Bennet’s “lively matter.” It is interesting that upon first seeing the house, Eleanor has problems establishing its basic physical qualities: “she could not even have told its color; or its style, or its size, except that it was enormous and dark, looking down on her” (33). The materiality of the house is so intense that it cannot be translated into words and descriptions, just like it cannot be measured, and the encounter with the materiality is so overwhelming that it is “pure sensation.” By the end of the novel, it seems that Eleanor enters a state of heightened awareness of the existence of the house:
Eleanor sat, looking down at her hands, and listened to the sounds of the house. Somewhere upstairs a door swung quietly shut; a bird touched the tower briefly and flew off. In the kitchen the stove was settling and cooling, with little soft cracks. An animal—a rabbit?—moved through the bushes by the summerhouse. She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attic, the wood aging. (213)
In the same scene, she thinks, “I can feel the whole house” (219), entering a state of unity with the material. It seems that it is the initial fear experienced by Eleanor that enables the kind of sensual relation with objects to develop: “‘Fear,’ the doctor said,’ is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishment of reasonable patterns” (151). Eleanor agrees: “When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful, non-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows … I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet” (151). She speaks of Hill House: “I think it’s because it was so unreal by any pattern of thought I’m used to; I mean, it just didn’t make sense” (131).
Placing the house as the center of attention in her novel, Jackson evokes in her readers what Jane Bennett calls “an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality” (Vibrant Matter x). Hill House is useless as a tool, unintelligible as a symbolic code, and inaccessible as an object of scientific experimentation. Instead, it is characterized by its frustrating materiality, which has an intense influence on the physical and mental wellbeing of the protagonists. The activity of Hill House cannot be explained in terms of physics or ghosts, that is post-mortem human activity. People avoid Hill House just like they avoid admitting the existence of the agency of the material. Hill House is a symbol of the repressed Other-thing which is autonomous and agentic, a thing as an opposition to an object, a thing that frees itself of humans, not the other way around. Perceiving Hill House through the lens of non-anthropocentric object studies allows us to further problematize its quality. Hill House is part of culture, built by humans according to certain plans and containing family souvenirs, but it also stands in opposition to culture, maintaining a nature that is incomprehensible to humans. Hill House acts and is not simply acted upon. Unable to be purified by the modern binary, conflating the characteristics of both nature and society, Hill House best exemplifies the Latourian hybrid as a “quasi-object, quasi-subject” (95). It becomes Gothic proof of the inadequacy of the Modern Constitution whose tearing down is the source of fear experienced by the characters. Conceptualizing a hybrid, after all, is for the moderns “the horror that must be avoided at all costs” (112).
Contrasting with Hill House’s sense of otherworldliness is the highly realistic location of Pepper Street in The Road Through the Wall, Jackson’s first novel and the only one to provide a specific time and place for its action, becoming practically a piece of “mimetic fiction” (Pascal 77). The physical details provided by Jackson instill the readers with a sense of familiarity, rendering Pepper Street a representative living place for its specific historical period. While remaining a potent “spatial metaphor” (Antoszek 77), so common and recognizable is this location that for most of the novel it becomes rather see-through and easily ignorable, lacking a sensual specificity, which seems to remain hidden under a layer of semantic value. Exemplifying the effect of “readiness-to-hand” is the opening section of the novel which, while describing each of the houses on Pepper Street, almost immediately turns them into a series of signifiers, forcing them to speak more about their owners and their personalities, worldviews, and relations, than themselves as material objects. Thus, “the Venetian blinds” and “the hedge around the visible sides of the house” belonging to the Desmonds are easily interpretable as indicators of the social isolation of a family that thinks of themselves as aristocrats among their neighbors (2). Similarly, the “orchard of apple trees” is quickly explained in its function of “hid[ing] the house of crazy old Mrs. Mack” (2), and the garden belonging to the Random-Joneses is specified to be a way of “compensating for the tiny house” (3). The house of the spinster Miss Fielding “seemed to be set high above ground, as though she were living in a tree, or on a houseboat,” thus presenting the character’s noticeable detachment from her neighbors and the earth at large (4). Other significant symbols include the wall, which characterizes the neighborhood as a “venerable socioeconomic borderline that is not to be transgressed” (Pascal 84), and the dirt that spreads around during the demolition of the wall, which stands for “outsiders, and class or ethnic Others” (Pascal 86). Overall, Pepper Street is largely reduced to its functionality, remaining a practical tool for physical and symbolic use by its characters and by readers of the novel. None of the objects appear to struggle for agency the way Hill House does. The state of objecthood, however, is not narrowly limited and expands onto more beings, from tools to nature to people, creating the condition for what Latour calls hybridization.
There is in the novel a hybrid different than Hill House yet functioning similarly, achieving the same result of undermining the subject-object binary. As Brown suggests, our routinary modern understanding of personhood can be questioned not only “because these things (however actively or passively) have somehow come to resemble us,” as was shown in the case of Hill House, but also because “enmeshed as we are in the object world, we can’t at times differentiate ourselves from things” (Other Things 9). The way in which Jackson problematizes the binary categories of personhood and objecthood in The Road Through the Wall is by presenting to her readers a slightly different kind of hybrid: persons becoming objects, humans resembling “inert matter” and being treated as such by other humans. It is most noticeable in, though not limited to, the treatment of children by their parents, which turns raising children into the process of object making. In the world of the adults depicted by Jackson, children are limited in what they can do, how they can express themselves, and what they can interact with. Instead of exploring their own identities and exercising their agency, they mostly play the role of signifiers, carrying the meaning encoded in them to facilitate their family’s communication with other families and the larger cultural-economic system. Thus, Johnny Desmond is supposed to embody the quality of strength admired by his father, and Harriet Merriam must represent the purity so desired by her mother. When characters Pat Byrnes and Artie Roberts first appear in the novel, they are being ordered around by their mothers: “That’s not the way my boy does … Sit down” (13), “Eat, Artie … You’ve got to get some meat on you” (19). This turns the most basic actions of a living being into a matter of following instructions. The portrayal of children as easily reified provides a commentary on the dangerous expansion of the modern binary; by being in a disadvantageous position with respect to age, (or physical disability as in the case of Miss Tyler), one risks the absorption into the category of objects, with all of its ethical consequences.
The most objectified of the bunch is arguably the character of Tod, the youngest child of the Donalds, aged thirteen. Bullied by his siblings and ignored by his parents, Tod appears in the novel sporadically and almost every time he does so, we see him attempting to draw the attention of other children and win their acceptance. These attempts, however, remain unsuccessful; each act of communication leads to further ostracization and his continuing objectification. From the opening of chapter two we learn that “[n]obody ever noticed Tod … nobody waited for him or asked him to wait” (33). As a son, brother, and neighbor, he is characterized by the “lack of independent existence” (34), because of which he “rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself” (63), the complete opposite of the intentionality and agency expressed by Hill House. Toward the end of chapter two, there is a puzzling yet highly important scene of Tod breaking into his neighbors’ house which provides us with one of the most sensually charged descriptions of the whole novel:
The glass door took him directly into the Desmond dining-room, and, since he had never been inside the Desmond house before, he first regarded the walls, and the ceiling, and the floor, before going on to a more intimate investigation … Tod went to the painted wall and felt it with his finger, leaving an almost imperceptible touch on the light paint. He bent over the table and saw his face reflected dimly in the polished wood … Tod took hold of one of the chairs; it was unexpectedly heavy, and he had to use both hands to tip it over backward and examine the under part. When he put the chair back into place he caught sight of his face reflected in the silver coffee service on a side table … he looked back into the table and found his face there, back to the coffee-pot and found his face again. (64)
This flash-like moment of vibrancy allows Tod to enter the world of things in their owners’ absence, or: in the absence of humans.
What is valuable to keep in mind is that Tod’s act of breaking in has no purpose other than itself; Tod does not come inside with the intention of stealing anything or vandalizing the property. There is no plan in his mind as he continues walking through the rooms. Instead of such cold instrumental treatment of the house, we see Tod abandoning himself to the sensual experience of looking at, touching, smelling, and becoming one with walls, floors, furniture, as he enters a state of heightened affective sensitivity, similar to that experienced by Eleanor. It is an encounter with the thingness, which Brown calls “a field of sensations” devoid of cognitive analysis (Other Things 22). The puzzlement and curiosity that Tod feels creates a condition of enchantment within the Desmond house that stimulates Tod’s perception of the world and his own place within it. Especially important to notice is the repeated act of Tod’s recognition of his own face reflected in the objects: “in the sleek blackness” of the piano (64), “in the toaster” (65), “in the mirror wall behind the perfume bottles” (66). As explained by Brown, thingness results not only in the emergence of specific objects but also in the emergence of the subject itself, as the one who observes and experiences the material: thingness is the “outcome of an interaction (beyond the mutual constitution) between subject and object” (Other Things 22). The shocking “realization of his face reflected in all those mirrors, shining distorted in the silver coffee-pot, superimposed on Caroline’s picture, frightened” Tod (68) and the reason behind this intensity of emotion is that things teach Tod something shocking not only about themselves, but also about Tod in relation to them. The thingness of objects allows Tod to recognize his own state of objecthood. Moreover, it provides him with a desire for the kind of unity with the material world that existed prior to the subject-object separation in the development of a child, as, for instance, described by Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, children originally do not perceive the things around them as “external to the self” (5), instead having an “adualistic consciousness” (6); only as their intelligence develops, the “object concept, far from being innate or given ready-made in experience, is constructed little by little” (4).
This desire was previously foreshadowed in the scene of Harriet observing the eucalyptus trees behind her window after having a shocking confrontation with her mother: “Lovely, lovely things, she thought, and tried to imagine herself sinking into them” (29). Harriet realizes that autonomy is being forcefully taken away from her when she has to burn her love letters and diaries, the records of her private thoughts, and is consequently forbidden from engaging in playfully romantic scenarios with the neighboring boys, all in the name of the propriety of “a good decent home” (29). It is not only Harriet who reaches outside of the constricting space of her house to find comfort in the material, specifically in the objects of nature which function outside of the jurisdiction of the parents. The transformative potential of things is hinted at in the parallel scenes of Pat and Artie and then Harriet and Marilyn visiting the creek, which is described as “meander[ing] democratically past the strict border line” of the wealthier neighborhood (50). In this democratic, marginal space, the boys freely insult their fathers while lying in the grass, and the girls confide in each other while digging a hole and burying their secret messages. Noticeably, Pat and Artie experience “pleasant comfort that came … mostly from the feeling of ground and grass under them and trees and sky overhead, with no houses to be seen” (52), and the girls are said to be “reverting to the completely informal mud-pie state of mind” (109). These young people can find in nature the kind of calmness, equality, and future potentiality that is absent from the restricting subject-object hierarchy upheld by their parents in their homes. To them, as with the Desmond house for Tod, the creek functions as an indicator that there is, as Hito Steyerl phrases it, “a different possibility … How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among things?” Thus, the novel reveals children’s imagined attempts at the emancipatory practice of becoming objectified, rather than subjected, which only Tod brings to fulfilment.
At this early stage in her literary exploration, however, it seems that Jackson questions the possibility of successfully undermining the subject-object duality. As Tod fails to entirely merge with the material world, to achieve the state of physical unity, and to thus soothe his existential paralysis, he turns to aggression as a coping mechanism. In chapter four, he distributes the accumulated emotional charge to various objects at the dinner table: “He had time … to hate things individually: the blue-patterned plates … the cup by his mother’s plate … He hated the blue platter … the salt and pepper shakers … he hated the silverware designed in flowers” (125). It can be looked at as “the act of differentiating abuse towards things” (Other Things 250); unable to completely overturn the subject-object hierarchy, Tod tries to gain some level of control by positioning himself higher above the objects which he realizes are being used by his family and society at large to force him into submission. This, however, proves to be futile. To his family, he remains a lower kind of being which deserves belittling at the dinner table even by his sister: “I wish you’d make Toddie eat like a human being” (127). In a sudden twist of events, by the end of the novel, Tod is accused of murdering the Desmonds’ daughter, Caroline, and commits suicide when left unsupervised by a policeman, consequently creating the highly subversive moment of confusion and “excitement” (182) in which the residents of Pepper Street are forced to question whether Caroline is dead or alive, and whether Tod is the perpetrator or falsely accused of unspeakable acts, uncertainties which point to the nature of agency and humanness. The gruesome homicide in the novel can be considered Tod’s last attempt to establishing his agency in the eyes of others; it prompts his neighbors to look at him, however momentarily, through the lens of his actions and his capacity to inflict death, and, as we may speculate, becomes a catalyst of change in his family and the neighborhood from which they move out. Perhaps only after turning himself into a corpse, an entity which is both a human and a thing, Tod at last “gain[s] back what he had lost by being born at all” (95), suggesting some primal state of fullness that was denied to him once he became a “person,” unwillingly subjected to the societal expectations and turned into an object.
Written at a time of intense changes in the material conditions of life, Jackson’s novels express a concern with the relationship between humans and the material world and problematize the effects which the modernist subject-object binary may have on the treatment of things as well as people, thus anticipating some of the theoretical interests of the currently developing Non-Human Turn. While The Road through the Wall depicts the problematic situation of habitually perceiving objects only in their state of “readiness-to-hand” that results in conflating children and objects, The Haunting of Hill House uses the Gothic framework to imagine “un-ready-to-hand” things which refuse to be used and understood. Both works emphasize the value of sensory cognition in understanding the world: the potential of thingness to uncover and rebel against the modern condition of reification. Thus, the openly enchanted physical world in The Haunting of Hill House can be perceived as a radical reaction to the seemingly “purified” world of Pepper Street. What is more, the two novels question ontological duality by introducing what Latour calls “hybrids”: Tod as an object-like child devoid of agency and incapable of creating meaning in the adult world, and Hill House as an object whose agency comes from entirely outside of the human culture and which cannot be explained and controlled, but instead requires a completely new approach towards the material.
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