Just a weird vent.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - First, the one of these things that’s not like the other. I claim to love Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but what I really love the idea of a feminist icon in the industrial age writing against social norms. Yes, I adore the short story the “Yellow Wallpaper”. Even more, I love that it intrigued my niece who at the time was extremely anti-reading. YES! Catch the attention of another generation of women! You go, Perkins Gilman! Keep encouraging us to stand up for our medical rights and vote (she was, naturally, a suffragist).

I own a book of her short stories which are pretty good. Most of them are average stories of the time period with some underlining themes of socialism and reform. However, I’ve also read Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, her three feminist utopian novels. The trio of stories are a bit bland, definitely taking some framework from Thomas More’s original Utopia where it it more about over-explaining how a perfect society could work over giving barely any character development or plot. Still, the books present interesting ideals of family, work, and government as well as gender roles (imagine the Barbie movie, except with lots of offspring and very strict rules). While she does touch on sexism and equality, these books also discuss eugenics and racism. Like, a lot.

Academically and historically, I want to say I love Perkins Gilman. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I know she is quite cringe worthy. Just can’t have nice things sometimes.

Shirley Jackson - I love her unreliable narrators and subtle creepiness. However, my love of Shirley Jackson was nearly squashed before it began by over saturation. In high school, my honors English class read “The Lottery”. There was an instant attachment there. My young mind whirled with this exciting alternate reality and gruesome normalcy.

Then, my first year in college, we read it again. I remember the instructor being so excited to see our reactions to the ending and I confess to faking it to make her feel better (insert innuendo here). This time, the bloom was off the rose and I was less intrigued by the tale. By the fourth and fifth times I was forced to re-read it, I started to blame Shirley Jackson personally.

Despite my enjoyment of the 1963 film The Haunting (if you mention the 1999 version, you are dead to me), I would not read the book The Haunting of Hill House until I was much older. I did not start to collect her books and read others until I was in my late-twenties and through my thirties. It’s rather annoying how school actually turned me off of an author I love for almost a decade.

Mary Shelley - Anyone who has seen my house knows that it is full of references to Universal’s Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein. These films coming in second after my love of the original Mummy, but they make less decent merchandise of that one. I know a lot of details of Mary Shelley’s life and family. When I was in my preteens, I already knew the tale of the dark and stormy night when she was dared to write a ghost story by Lord Byron. Between my boyfriend and myself, I think we’ve seen or read almost every dramatization of that night (by the way, if he dies before me I’ve already been told that I can’t keep his calcified heart like Mary did with Percy Shelley’s). I dressed up as her once for a spirit day where I work. Mary Shelley is featured on tee-shirts and notebooks that I own. I’ve even read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Okay, that’s a partial truth. I never actually finished this revered early piece of feminism by Shelley’s mom, but I’ll get back to it someday. I also own multiple biographies of Mary Shelley and watched many a documentary of her life. If I clearly was so obsessed this author, why do I say that we have a troubled relationship? Because for the longest time I claimed hated the book Frankenstein.

That’s right. The first time I actually read it was probably high school. *Side note: I wasn’t being forced to read it. I had independent study in an English class reading it so I thought I might as well figure out what they were talking about. I remember it was difficult to get through with all of the philosophy and the journal style prose, especially since at that age everything in my life was about Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My eighteen year old mind gave thanks to the episode of Wishbone in which the little dog played the mad doctor since it gave me a better background for understanding the book.

This having been said, if anyone said anything bad about this novel, I defended the crap out of it. If you told me that you hated how depressing it was, I retorted with reasons for each tragedy in the development of the creature’s character. When someone mentioned they were disappointed by the the creature’s wide vocabulary, I would violently exclaim the importance of him being so intelligent. And I would take it personally when others could not finish the book (even though I’m pretty sure I put it down and picked it back up again in my first reading).

The only time I didn’t defend the story was when my dad came to me after watching the Kenneth Branagh film. My bedroom door was pushed open with an irritated swing and he stood there looking aggravated. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Is that how the book ends?”

I nonchalantly shrugged at him. “Except for Elizabeth being brought back to live, pretty much.”

His eyebrows and rose and he spat, “That’s stupid.”

I didn’t argue with him. He’s my dad and he’s never really been a fan of the classics with the exception of Muppet Christmas Carol. By the way, I own that movie on a lovely Arrow bluray.

Anyway, by the time I was in my late twenties, I finally read Frankenstein again, deciding I’d been too young to judge it. Despite the utter hopelessness of the story, I loved it and have read it a few times since. The mother of science-fiction horror has a special spot on my bookshelf and my boyfriend bought me a fancy Penguin Cloth-bound edition covered in anatomically correct hearts. I also own copies of The Last Man, Lodore, and several of her short stories. That doesn’t mean my love of the Universal horror films has waned. I know there is no Bride in the book, but she’s too cool not to have all over my house.

Do any other people have strange reader-author relationships?

* I have several upcoming movie and TV blogs coming up which were written before the writers’ strike. I’m just going to post them until I run out.

“You publish this, you know what it costs.” Shirley says this to Steve about his memoir of their family’s time in a haunted house.

I waited to do this one so I could include spoilers. That having been said - Spoilers ahead!

First off, I have to declare my love for the original book and the 1963 film. Shirley Jackson was the queen of the unreliable narrators and it was magnificent! Even though she intended (according to later interviews) to always make Hill House haunted, the book is written in just the write way to make you question whether the events are supernatural or not. Director Robert Wise captured this atmosphere with even more subtly in the movie. And if anyone in the comments asks me about the 1999 version, you will get a long rant about fourteen year old me seeing that in theatres and experiencing wanting my money back for the first time.

Mike Flanagan rearranged the story completely, but kept that sense of paranoia and second guessing. By the way, I refused to watch this at first, declaring it looked nothing like the book (I had been burned before!). My friends lied to me and said, “Oh no, it’s pretty close to the book.” Turns out they’d never read the book although one of them has since (looking at you, Kira Shay).

Trigger warning - if you decide to watch the Haunting of Hill House, it deals in grief, suicide, mental health, addiction, and family trauma).

In all versions, Hill House is a structure which feeds on the energy of people. In Flanagan’s take, the house’s receives a family seven come to flip it in the early 90s. The parents, Hugh and Liv, are hoping this is the final time they will have to renovate a house and sell it so the family can have their forever home. Their child include Steve the skeptic, Shirley the practical one, Theo the stand-offish one, and the twins Luke and Nell. The house feeds upon each of them until one mysterious night Liv dies and Hugh takes them all away without a proper explanation.

As adult, the five kids blame Hill House or their parents for their issues. None of them have a good relationship with Hugh, who left the house boarded up to rot without further reasoning. Luke is a heroin addict, constantly in and out of rehab. Nell suffers from sleep paralysis, depression, and dies in Hill House at the beginning of the series. Theo is a child psychiatrist who uses her power of touching people/things to get emotions, the reason she wears gloves and shuts herself off to others most of the time. Shirley runs a funeral business with her husband, an endeavor she wants to be perfect. Finally, Steve turned around his failed novelist career by becoming a paranormal investigator and writing books based on what others see in haunted places. In case you didn’t already guess, I’m going to be focusing on Steve.

Flanagan mixes in word-for-word quotes from the original book in Steve’s narration from his own work. Jackson’s spooky and straight-forward style adds to the idea of Steve’s writing hiding his own disbelief. It lends itself well to the internet theories that the black mold in Hill House actually caused everything.

I get why Steve wanted to use their childhood as the basis of a book. And he was totally right. It was a bestseller. However, the way he goes about the process felt backwards. He writes the book, sends it to an editor and agent, gets a deal, AND THEN asks his siblings for permission. Shirley declares that he’s a phony since he never saw or heard anything in Hill House, yet uses their experiences and their mother’s mental illness to make a buck. She refuses any money he offers from the book sales. The others secretly agree to the money and later harp on Steve for using their pain to become famous. Theo even points out what he got wrong in book because (fanfare please) HE NEVER ASKED THEM WHILE WRITING IT!

He should have interviewed them. Written it with their help. Gotten the facts and permission first. However, nope. Steve was going to do what Steve was going to do. He does learn his lesson after that to a point. He starts interviewing people, asking if they will let him tell their stories of ghosts and terrors. He writes his books in such a way to feel like he believes in what he writes. That being said, Steve is so dismissive of what others believe he makes people feel bad about seeing ghosts.

When the family returns to the house, it feeds on each of their insecurities. For Steve it’s his writing and how he betrayed his family.

“Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about are real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real, but not to you, is it? Not until you chew it up and digest it and you shit it out on a piece of paper. And even then, it’s a pale imitation at best.” A version of Steve’s wife in his head says this when the house is trying claim him. Seems to me that Hill House was not a fan of the book. Who knew houses could read?

Megan's Blogs