The History of a House

The readings for this week, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “The Little Room,” “The Rats in the Walls” and The Haunting of Hill House, all center around the idea of a home with mysterious, supernatural qualities.

 I find this concept to be very exciting because as we discussed in lecture, a home is supposed to be where a person or family can feel safe, like no one is watching them, and overall exude a sense of security and protection.

 In addition to the panic that ensues when these comforts are taken away in a home, the history of a house can seem very haunting. Most houses are structures that are built to last and are intended to have several generations of inhabitants. When one family moves out, another moves in. If you consider the connection, sense of ownership and protection that you feel from your home and think about the fact that others, perhaps many before you, shared this connection and lived their daily lives in that very place—it is very disturbing. What kinds of things happened before you got there? Anything unnatural? Anything sinister? Violent? Terrible? Magical? Happy? Sad?

 I feel that these are the kind of questions that the characters in our readings must have asked of the houses that they encountered.  How many women had suffered similar fates in the room with the yellow wallpaper before “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes place? What really happened in that nursery before she got there? Who had lived in the house with the little room to make it disappear and reappear? The aunts? Something else?  What really happened in the great gothic walls before they were refurbished in “The Rats in the Walls?” How did those people live their daily lives knowing what lied underneath the house? What really happened in the times of the Romans so many years ago? Who inhabited the blue and green rooms before Eleanor and Theodora?