Reality and Fantasy

In both The Haunting of Hill House and “The Sandman” the idea of what the characters believe to be real plays a large role in how the plots unfold. For Eleanor, her reality is quite sad and throughout the story she makes up many aspects of her life like giving her age as 34, that she has an apartment of her own with specific decorations, and the familial bond she finds with Dr. Montague, Luke, and Theo. Eleanor’s reality is that her sister appears to only care for the car they share and her mother was never very loving to her. It seems almost natural for Eleanor to want to escape because her reality is her nightmare.

For Nathanael in “The Sandman” his reality is that Coppelius is an evil man that killed his father and out to get him, but is repeatedly told by Klara that he could let go of that hatred and ill will if he wanted to: “only your belief in their [Coppelius and Coppola] hostile influence can make them in reality” (146). Nathanael seems to be obsessed over what is real and what is not, which is odd since he later falls madly in love with an automaton after insulting Klara earlier in the story by calling her an automaton.

This tension between the real and the imagined makes a reader question what makes something like a family real. Eleanor imagines her new friends as a surrogate family and Hill House as her home, while Nathanael imagines Coppelius as an evil entity out to destroy his life. But don’t we all tell ourselves stories about reality? The stories seem to suggest that how we perceive events, situations, and people are often just narratives we invent.