Monstrous Motherhood in “The Haunting of Hill House”
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Horror, TV Series, Motherhood, Television, Culture

Monstrous Motherhood in “The Haunting of Hill House”

In the Netflix horror drama, the mother is the real monster.

In some ways, we seem to be living in a golden age of motherhood stories. Numerous prestige cable dramas have focused on the fraught relations between mothers and their children and between mothers and other mothers. Both HBO and Hulu seem to be leading the way here, with the former giving us such shows as Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects and the latter serving up the fiery clash of Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington in Little Fires Everywhere.

The common thread, of course, is that many of the mothers that appear in these shows are, not to put too fine a point on it, monstrous. They are women who cannot or will not separate themselves from their children, who confuse their own desires for that of their offspring and, in at least one case, literally poison their children so as to keep them dependent on their care. As a result, their children struggle to make sense of their own identities and places in the world.

Which brings us to The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series that is an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name. The show focuses on the Crain family — father Hugh, mother Olivia, and their children Jake, Shirley, Theodora, Nell, and Lucas — as they contend with the malevolent spirit of the house that they are attempting to flip.

From the very first episode, it’s clear that there are to be two villains in this story. One, as the title itself suggests, is Hill House. The other is, unfortunately the family matriarch, Olivia Crain. And, as the series goes on, they become so inextricably intertwined that they become almost one and the same. The surviving family’s efforts to detach themselves from the house and its resident evil are, in many ways, also an effort to sever themselves from the (s)mothering influence of Olivia. In that first episode, Steven Crain, the eldest of the children, recalls being dragged out of Hill House by his father, leaving his mother behind (she is, as Hugh says, no longer herself). Since the viewer is sutured into Steven’s perspective, and since he has been commanded to keep his eyes closed, the only glimpses we get of Olivia are of a white-garbed figure shambling around the halls of the house as Hugh flees with the children. From the beginning, then, the mother is painted as something dark and unknowable, a sinister force that is all the more chilling because she remains largely unseen.

As the series unfolds, we see each of the children struggle with the legacy of that night for, after Hugh fled with the children, Olivia took her own life. And, unfortunately, it’s not long before the Nell, the youngest daughter and twin of Luke, ends up taking her own life…in Hill House. It is subsequently revealed that she was led to do so by the spirit of her own mother. When I first watched the episode with this revelation, I thought perhaps that it wasn’t Olivia’s ghost at all that was responsible for Nell’s fatal suicide. I thought that it was perhaps some vengeful spirit of the house that took her form in order to lure Nell to her doom. Alas, it is indeed Olivia, who still yearns for the children to return to her embrace, years after she nearly murdered them with poison.

It’s not until the penultimate episode that we finally get to understand Olivia’s experience and the sequence of events that led to her going mad, attempting to poison her two youngest children, and ultimately taking her own life by throwing herself from from the upstairs balcony. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the malevolent denizens of the house, Poppy Hill, who manages to convince her that, unless she kills her children, they will lead lives filled with darkness and pain. Seduced and driven mad by her susceptibility to Poppy’s overtures, she almost poisons both Luke and Nell with rat poison (and does, in fact, succeed in poisoning the young daughter of the house’s caretakers). Wounded and totally mad by this point, her suicide comes to seem more of a relief. Her tragedy is that it was her maternal bond with her children that proved her undoing.

Thus, even though the series is ostensibly about the house itself, it’s revealing that it’s Olivia who most falls victim to its sinister influences. She is also the force that irresistibly draws each of the children back to her, so desperate is she to have them join her in the afterlife. In fact, it’s only when Hugh confronts her and offers himself up as a sacrifice that she is willing to abandon these efforts, content to have her husband and their youngest daughter with her in her eternal imprisonment at Hill House. The rest of the children, fortunately for them, are allowed to leave and take up (mostly normal) lives, and the series concludes with a montage showing them putting the pieces of their lives back together.

While the series clearly wants us to see this as a happy ending (in fact, the original ending was changed for precisely that reason), there’s something more than a little disingenuous about these final scenes. They remind us that this family can only heal itself of its grievous psychological wounds once the mother has been safely expunged, both from the narrative and from their lives. Her influence, like that of Hill House, had become so malevolent that it haunted them even when they were not there. Had Hugh not exerted his patriarchal authority, it’s very likely that they all would have ended up as prisoners in that house, a family united in a macabre semblance of family togetherness (which in fact is pretty close to what was originally intended for the ending).

Personally, I’m of two minds about this phenomenon. On the one hand, it’s great to see so many women getting to play monsters. Women, as Gillian Flynn (the author of Sharp Objects) notes, have every right to be seen as villains. On the other, it’s rather distressing to see motherhood portrayed in such a relentlessly negative light. While it might be great to see women get to be the antiheroes, I can’t help but think that there are better ways to do it than what we see in Hill House, since almost every other episode focuses on the children and their struggles, and we don’t get the mother’s point of view until near the very end, by which point we’re already primed to see her as either a dupe or a monster (or both).

As E. Ann Kaplan noted some time ago in her book Motherhood and Representation, popular culture seems to take a rather dim view of mothers and the roles they play in the lives of their children. The recent spate of shows showing the monstrous side of motherhood is a potent reminder that such hostility is still alive and well.