Emily Dickinson: "ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted,"

ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted, 

One need not be a house; 

The brain has corridors surpassing 

Material place. 

Far safer, of a midnight meeting

External ghost, 

Than an interior confronting 

That whiter host. 

Far safer through an Abbey gallop, 

The stones achase,

Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter 

In lonesome place. 

Ourself, behind ourself concealed, 

Should startle most; 

Assassin, hid in our apartment,

Be horror’s least. 

The prudent carries a revolver, 

He bolts the door, 

O’erlooking a superior spectre 

More near.

Hey guys. I know, I know, I'm late. Even by our blog's West Coast time frame. If this were a video project I guess I'd be subjected to punishment of some sort, but unless one of you suggests something, I think I'm free. Yesterday was oversleeping a bit, working an Accepted Students Open House, CS Lab Class, Physics test, Racquetball (I actually scored some points, aww yeah) then working on the CS Project. We kind of called it quits at midnight, and I wasn't really coherent enough to be blogging at the point, you can ask Adam.

So this morning I was looking around and was going through some Emily Dickinson (because she seems like someone I should use) when I found this, which really reminded me of my Writing Seminar Final Research Paper, which I think I'm going to talk about. That's right, I'm late and I'm reusing old material. Oh well.

So my Writing Seminar class was a study in Mysteries, and at one point we read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Our Final had to somehow use another work we did not read in class and be related to some topic we had discussed, so I decided to compare Jackson's Hill House with Stephen King's The Shining, because they were similar and I wanted to read/write about Stephen King. It ends up that King was inspired by Jackson's Hill House to write The Shining, and when I found that out I was like, oh, I've hit the research paper jackpot. 

The thesis of my paper was that King and Jackson were able to create truly terrifying stories by treating both of their respective houses as characters in the stories. Each house (err, hotel in one case, but that's really only semantics) has a history, its own personal motivation, and serves as a mirror for the emotions of the people inside it, which made them more real and all the more terrifying.

King has a book called Danse Macabre in which he discusses the horror genre because it's something very near and dear to his heart and he likes writing about writing almost as much as he likes just writing (His memoir/guide book On Writing lives in my purse). In it he discuses how there are two types of horror: external and internal. External is when the horror is caused by some sort of outside force, a giant plague tearing apart and wreaking havoc through the town. Internal horror is the more psychological stuff, the character study of an individual going through personal hell. The external horror has the pro of being able to do anything, because it's a mystical, outside force, it's capable of any atrocity you can conceive of, it's not bound by physical limitations. But that also takes away some of the realism, draws against the willing suspension of disbelief. That's where the internal really benefits; it has the emotional draw because it's so real and personal. It's a person, a person who could be you, you could be inside the story. What King ends up arguing is that haunted houses, despite their connotation of cheap tricks or the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World, are prime for combining both- they can be the ghosts of slamming doors, changing hallways, blood filled corridors if we're thinking of Kubrick's The Shining film adaptation, but it can also be a result of the psychological states of the people inside it. Eleanor Vance's insecurities written on the walls, Jack Torrence's greed and lack of self control ripping his poor family apart. The grandeur of external horror with the intimate, personal fear of internal.

And that's where we get back to the poem. Dickinson is saying here that internal demons are so much worse then any haunts or spooks of your local, deserted, decrepit house. That's very true. But sometimes, with writers as talented as Stephen King or Shirley Jackson, you can get the worst of both worlds, a double whammy. An even worse nightmare- the supernatural working with ourselves, hidden behind ourselves, to come at us from every angle. The things that hurt of the most, ubercharged by forces we can't even hope to understand.

I'm going to stop now at risk of rewriting my 10 page paper, but I did want to bring up that the funniest part of Hill House is when two new people come to the house, and one of them makes a point of cleaning and getting his gun ready. "I shall have with me a drawn revolver", he says, "do not take alarm, ladies; I am an excellent shot—and a flashlight, in addition to a most piercing whistle." Wow Arthur. Good job. What are you going to do, shoot the ghost? That'll show it. Hill House is really kind of disturbing, but it's not without its humor. The other person keeps whining that the ghost won't talk to her via old school Ouija board because the rest of the group isn't behaving. " 'Planchette,' she said bitterly, 'will not speak to me tonight. Not one single word have I had from planchette, as a direct result of your sneering and your skepticism;' ".

Have a good weekend everybody, I should probably get school work done before job work.

-Val