The Monstrous Feminine in The Haunting of Hill House, Part Three

While the last entry was focused on the archetypes of the monstrous feminine as defined by Barbara Creed, this entry will be focused on monster theory more generally. A key part of monster theory is how and why we make monsters, why we tell monster stories. This requires a look at the historical context of a story, the anxieties of the society at the time, the recent changes in the world that have shifted people’s perspectives.

One of my favorite examples is from Japan, which Michael Dylan Foster wrote about in his essay ‘Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan’. Trains came to Japan in 1872, and by 1907, there were almost five thousand miles of track (p. 337). The trains destroyed the discreteness of the villages, but it also created the sense of a national identity that couldn’t have existed before the trains. Around the new trains formed stories of phantom trains. These phantom trains threatened the real trains, sounding as if collisions were about to occur, but ultimately the phantom trains were ignored by the engineers, and they traveled on. This suggested that the modernization of Japan was the winning force—winning and inevitable. (This essay is in The Monster Theory Reader from 2020. I also recommend Foster’s book, The Book of Yōkai, if you’re interested in Japanese monsters.)

So let’s look at the anxieties surrounding the The Haunting of Hill House. The series came out in 2018, after being bought by Netflix in April 2017 off of a pitch. Then the screenplays for the episodes were written by a team of writers shortly after April 2017. For the writers and the audience, the story comes on the heels of some difficult years. Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, America elected Donald Trump for President in 2016, and North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2016 (and 2017, too, but in September, after the sale of TV show). It was a time of divisiveness, unrest, and deep-seated xenophobia.