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When forced to leave, she smashes her car into the wall, killing herself, triumphantly. For it is not a defeat, far from it - in the moment she makes her decision to merge with the dark powers, Eleanor is more blazingly alive than she has ever been in her life.

(”Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson” by Judy Oppenheimer, pg. 227)

I couldn’t have said it better than how Oppenheimer does. Yes, this idea is exactly what I’m working on with combination of Queer identities. 

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Working From Home

I’ve had a lot I’ve had to take care of at home, so I’ve chosen to work from home this last week. Since I came to college I learned that I liked to separate my work space from my domestic sphere so I feel a little guilty breaking my discipline. 

I’m currently writing my final report for the summer. I’m writing it from scratch rather than pulling from the writing I’ve already done. The final report is due on the 21st of this month. That’s become a very dramatic day for me - it’s the same day as the Great North American Solar Eclipse and it’s also the same day that I have to testify as a witness in court. What a day the 21st has become. The pressure is on and I’m going to keep writing! 

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I found a cool blog post about the film “The Haunting.”

So I’m not sure if this has been said already but there was a wonderful film version of “The Haunting of Hill House.” That’s where most of the images in my posts come from.

As I studied the grammatical structure of a passage in the novel which depicts the Queer domestic life that Theodora lead before coming to Hill House - the omission of pronouns which suggest taboo and thus unspoken relationships - I tried to see if there are other instances of queer characters in Jackson’s work. I can’t read her whole canon while working on this project, so I tried a couple quick google searches along the lines of “shirley jackson lesbian characters.” The grammar in the passage I’m studying is unique to that moment in Hill House - there are no gendered pronouns. I wanted to see if Jackson has repeated this in any other work of hers. Instead I came upon this fun piece from a LGBTQ++ website.

Here’s a link to an article called “Making It Out Alive: Theodora and the Lesbians of Horror.” I'm not using it in my research project because it’s not helpful in that sense but it was still fun to read.

https://www.autostraddle.com/making-it-out-alive-theodora-and-the-lesbians-of-horror-243874/

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7/2/17: Unconventional Office for  a Day

As a favor for a camp I used to work out, I drove the canoe trailer to different spots on the Delaware River to help some counselors complete their swift water rescue training. Even though it was a Sunday, I saw all the hours I would spend waiting for them to get to the boat access as a great time to get some reading done.

During this time, I reread Susan Poznar’s piece “Rocking and Reeling Through the Doors of Miscreation: Disequilibrium in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House” from the book Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fine de Siecle to the Millennium: New Essays. I need to use this text now because it’s interlibrary loan and I already renewed it once. Poznar has some very cool ideas about the architecture and the structure of Hill House that I’d like to apply to my ideas of Hill House representing Eleanor, and idea I got from looking at the Jackson papers.  

 “Jackson likewise obligingly offers convincing rationales for Hill House’s malaize when Montague explain the main floor’s confusing layout of concentric rings of rooms and suggests that any optical delusions or disorienting effects are due to deliberate defects of construction: wrong angles, off-center doorways, and other slight “aberrations” that create cognitive dissonance in the house's occupants.” (Poznar 146)

Poznar’s point is that there is something uncanny about the house even though the defects are slight. The people in the house are revolted by a house that is essentially the same as any other house. Applying the Eleanor-is-the-house metaphor to this, and we see that people are confused and repulsed by Eleanor even though she is basically the same as other people. This calls to mind the idiom that something has a “loose screw.” 

On a different note, I see how archival work and manuscripts can conflict with analysis. Poznar makes great points in her article but one of the points she makes is that it’s impossible to map out Hill House. I think about the floorplan Jackson drew of Hill House. Sure, this is just a sketch and could have been an idea that she scrapped early in the process. I do see Jackson’s map as a counter to Poznar’s point. However I can’t take that floorplan for granted because it wasn’t included in the final text. For all I know, the idea was scrapped before Erica became Eleanor. 

I already posted this image, but here’s one of the sketches I found of Hill House in the LOC’s Shirley Jackson collection. 

Returning to the point that this imagination of the Hill House could have been scrapped, some of these rooms are not mentioned once in the final story. 

I brought this problem up during our weekly HHG meeting and I got great advice from Nava. She said that I should take the floorplan and see if it comes through in the final text and if I can form the same counter argument against Poznar that I came up with from the manuscript papers just using the final text. Perhaps it does serve as a map of Hill House. Or perhaps, if I study the floor plan further, I can see how Jackson was trying to make a confusing house. I need to be strict with my procedure and not veer off into frivolous what-if’s about Jackson’s writing process. 

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6/8/17 Journal: Women in Peril in Cars, Women in Cars in Peril.

I’ve been drawing connections between the published version of “The Haunting of Hill House” and my favorite book “She’s Come Undone.” One of the connections I drew between these works was the use of a car to give an unmarried woman freedom. In Wally Lamb’s novel, Dolores access to a car is access to more than just a car. One of her friends urges her to buy a car because of the freedom it would give her. 

The car plays a huge role in the final version of the Hill House. First is the altercation Eleanor has with the representation of the nuclear family, when she fights with her sister to use the car that they both own. The sister forbids Eleanor to use the car but she does anyway, marking her first act of rebellion. The car is not brought up in a significant way until the end of the novel, when Eleanor is forced into her car to get her to leave Hill House and then her car crashes and she dies. 

For women trapped in the domestic sphere, a car is both a symbolic and an actual means of achieving freedom, or at least the freedom to move around. Looking at the draft I was studying, Theodora doesn’t have a car (which is altered in the final draft, as she at least had access to one when she drives herself to Hill House) and there are other ways of getting to Hill House. Mr. Jordan outlines how the four won’t be trapped at Hill House because of the train and because two of them have cars. Hill House is not the isolated realm that it is in the final version.

I’m trying to find some theory that helps me with this idea but I don’t want to stray to far from the more important focus of my research.

I’ve seen it in other movies and works as well - Pyscho. A car so directly represents physical mobility but I think that it goes deeper.

This convention has modern appearances as well. Take, for instance, the music video to Mitski’s “Happy.” This music video depicts a woman who believes her husband is cheating on her because she keeps finding signs of other women - locks of blonde hair, a purse with initials on it. The truth turns out to be much more sinister.

As a bonus, here’s a supercut of cars failing to start in horror films. Grandma, you probably shouldn’t watch this, you might find it upsetting.

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Original Research Questions

Here are the research questions I included in my proposal for this project. I wish I had posted this list earlier as a way of guiding anyone reading the blog! 

● How does the relationship between Theodora and Eleanor change over the different drafts? What was the original dynamic between the women?

● How did Eleanor’s resentment to her mother change? Was this relationship static through the the drafts, or did it look radically different in an earlier version?

● How does Eleanor’s relationship with her mother change in correlation to Eleanor’s relationship with Theodora?

● In addition to Eleanor’s relationship with her deceased mother, how was her relationship to her sister or her sister’s representation to the nuclear family?

● How does Eleanor’s rejection of societal norms transform in the different drafts?

● Tracing the queerness of the protagonist Eleanor, in the different relationships she holds.

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Sister Anne, Sister Anne

I followed up with the Sister Anne reference. I noticed this when I was rereading the final draft. The passage is:

“From the turn in the staircase Eleanor assumed that the room would be at the front of the house; sister Anne, sister Anne, she thought and moved carefully toward the light from the room.” (267-268)

This allusion turned out to be a treat for me. Sister Anne is a character from the story “Bluebeard.” Bluebeard is a French folktale. I remember reading a variation of it called “The Glass Bottle Trick” by Nalo Hopkinson in the Caribbean literature class I took with Professor Solomon in the fall 2016. I think we also read a variation of it in the Lesbian Immortal class I took, though I’m having trouble recalling the conversation. The standardized version of this story was written by Charles Perrault. The story goes that a woman married a rich man and he gave her the keys to the house when he left but told her not to open one room. She opens the room and sees the dead bodies of his past wives, they were killed for being disobedient and she awaits the same fate. Perrault’s version of this story has a happy ending - the husband is killed, the woman inherits his fortune, and then she remarries someone she loves. ‘Sister Anne’ is the protagonist’s sister. At the end of the story, the wife calls out to her sister over and over again, calling her name in the same chant that Eleanor uses. 

The effect of this allusion displays Eleanor’s inventive but also juvenile imagination. This reference also calls to mind women’s lack of agency in terms of marriage and the potential that this house is a place she shouldn’t be, a dangerous place. Indeed, women have died at this house. They weren’t murdered by the same man but the house took their lives.

This also draws more attention to the roles of Theodore and Carrie. Carrie does not come to the rescue for Eleanor and is instead a static antagonist. Theodore, at times a romantic prospect also seems to exist as a proxy sister, to give Eleanor the sister she never had. Maybe this is less about the actual familial bond and more about the intimacy with another woman. Because Eleanor didn’t have a good relationship with her family, she hasn’t experienced closeness to anyone let alone other women.

Finally, it’s insinuates that Eleanor is in trouble and she is not safe in this house. There is a room that is off limits in Hill House, though Eleanor does not know about the room in this point in the story. It’s the nursery, the symbolic womb of the house. 

Illustration by Gustave Doré, taken from  Encyclopedia Britannica. 

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“It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” Roland Barthes, Death of the Author.

This quote is from the opening anecdote of “Death of the Author.” I’ve run into Roland Barthes work mostly in visual studies related courses. I’ve never been assigned “Death of the Author” officially in class but it’s a work that’s had a strong influence on the way that I approach literary analysis. 

As I shift to the next phase of my research, I’ll be referring to Barthes work to keep focus and stay steady in my analysis. 

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6/7/17

I’m going to return to my study of the draft that I was last working with.

I’m coming in to a problem that I don’t know how to answer. It seems to me that some of these drafts are out of order. I think what this means is that I can no longer study the drafts on a linear timeline. But maybe that’s a conclusion that I shouldn’t jump to quite yet.

So in another version of the story, Theodora is the main character. I already noted this yesterday. She has replaced Eleanor - literally taken her place. The sister of the protagonist keeps the same namesake and even has the husband and child to pair it.

When taking Eleanor’s place, Theodora does not take on her timid and defeated qualities. She’s single but Carrie is actually the one trying to introduce bachelors to Theodora. There is some tension between Carrie and Theodora but in no way does Theodora hate Carrie. No mention of the dead mother thus far. And the premise which brings the party to Hill House is the opposite from the final version. The house is still haunted, but rather than being brought together as a sort of psychic experiment, the four are united to disprove that the house is haunted and restore the reputation of the property so that the Sanderson family can continue to rent the house out for profit. Theodora works at a bookshop and has her own apartment. Eleanor is writing a book. Dr. Montague is no longer Dr. Montague, he is a scholar who has lived his life disproving supernatural theories.

Something exciting about this draft is it’s raunchiness! There is mention of orgies in the first chapter of this version. I think nothing in the final draft of this story was overtly stated. All the flirtations had a very light touch in the final draft.

Theodora “had been invited for dinner to meet mr jordan, another man carrie had dug up in hopes that somehow, this time, she had found the one for theodora.” Theodora reflects “i must tell carrie that her efforts to find me a young man are getting more and more frantic.”

The former quote reminds me of something that Professor Thomas once said in Lesbian Immortal, a Queer Victorian Literature class I took in Fall 2016. She was talking about authors from the 1800/1900s who never married and how people thought it was so sad that these women never found love. To Professor Thomas, she sees the obvious: that likely, these women were queer and that’s why they didn’t marry - because they weren’t interested in men. Which doesn’t mean that these women were alone for their whole lives, rather that their romantic relationships would have been kept secret.

This reasoning is part of the reason why I think that Theodora remains queer in this alternate version of the story. Though her sexuality remains intact, she is not as opposed to the nuclear family as her counterpart Eleanor is. Additionally, Theodora is the older sister instead of being the younger sister as Eleanor is in the final draft. Does this change the family dynamic?

I can’t even begin to compare this passage to the passage in the final version of the story when Eleanor is fighting with her sister over the use of the car.

This takes me to another point - the presence of transportation and isolation in this version of Hill House compared to the final.

Theodora doesn’t have a car and Hill House is closer in proximity and accessibility to the city than it appeared to be in the final story. Mr. Jordan, the man arranging for visit in Hill House tells her about the access to the house. “it is approximately fourteen miles east of the city of –––-. there is train service from here to that city, and you should find no difficulty in returning here occasionally to see your sister, or for other errands you may have; you do not own a car, i believe?” Theodora replies no and Mr. Jordan continues, “luckily, two of your associates do, and will drive to the house from their homes; there will thus be easy communication between the house and the neighboring city. i am thinking of supplies, and perhaps an occasional evening’s pleasure. your purpose will be, of course, observation in the house, but we do not expect that you will never leave there. your report will be more valuable, your mind less clouded, if you spend an hour or so away from the house now and then.” Later in the conversation, when discussing the risk of Theodora losing her reputation for staying in Hill House, Mr. Jordan says “i would therefore suggest that your sister and, if possible, her husband and child, be invited to visit during some part of your stay in the house; no one could criticize your behavior if it were known that your sister countenanced it by her presence.”

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6/6/2017

Here’s a picture of the first page of the story and and the first page of the first draft! Very exciting stuff. I had a blip when I misplaced the thumb drive that contained my scans from the library of congress, but thanks to a very dear friend the drive has been found and my research continues in the way I planned!

I’m noticing differences in the structure from the first draft and the final draft.

One thing they have in common is the first sentence of the story. The first draft starts with the following quote:

“No living organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks are supposed by some to dream.”

The final draft’s first line is essentially the same.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” (Jackson 243)

There is a adjective verb form switch from “living” in the first version to “live” in the final version. Additionally, the final version modifies the temporality of continue to exist sanely but adding the word long. On the bottom of this page there is writing that says “grasshopper” “dragonflies” “butterflies” and “Katydid.” In the final draft, Jackson chose katydids.

The story of the first draft starts with Eleanor outside of Hill House. We see this moment of action without an interaction to the house or to Eleanor. And of course, at this point in the story her name is Erica. This scene occurs in section five of chapter one, so it’s later in the story. This bolder introduction of Eleanor comes with a bolder version of the character. The differences in the manuscript and the final draft show that Eleanor’s character change was to a meeker character. This scene depicts Eleanor trying to gain access to Hill House. She has to convince the stubborn gatekeeper, Mr. dudley, to let her in. In the final version, she doubts herself. Eleanor “falter[s]” and she doubts herself, wondering “Or am I [expected at Hill House]?” and “is this [the gates] as far as I go?” (Jackson 261). Not only does the first draft lack these details but they include moments of a bolder Eleanor does not exist in the final draft. When asked “who says” by Mr. Dudley instead of faltering, which is what happens in this point in the final draft, she says “i say. unlock the gate at once, please.” A couple lines down is mention of Eleanor’s temper. This occurs in both of the versions we are looking at. In both versions, “She could already see that she was losing her temper.” But in the first draft Jackson wrote on the subject of temper that she lost her temper “easily and violently.” In the final draft, the opposite is true. “She could already see that she was losing her temper, which she did rarely because she was so afraid of being ineffectual…” (Jackson 261). Eleanor is depicted as a timid woman in the final version of the story. Before the moment of rebellion and strength at the gate, we see her disempowered with her family life. It’s a completely different story set up.

First draft:

Final draft: This moment is extended and the depth that is gained from expanding this moment shows Eleanor’s insecurities and fears.

The temperament continues in the dialogue. In the final version, Eleanor pleads for Mr. Dudley to listen to her: “Listen,” she called after him, still trying not to sound angry, “I am one of Doctor Montague’s guests; he will be expecting me in the house – please listen to me!” (Jackson 262)

Many of the changes from the first draft to the final draft are additive and as I said earlier the expansion of the story leads to more depth for Eleanor. This depth adds to her character. In the final draft, she’s self conscious, fearful, and doubts herself. Perhaps the timidness of Eleanor makes her a likable underdog, someone to root for. Perhaps this change in temperament provided a solution to flaws in the narrative arc. By starting the story at this state, she is a dynamic character. 

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Friday Check In + Free Write 6/2/17

Close reading of Haunting of Hill House - Early House Descriptions (Library of America Edition)

     The narrator tells us that “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills” (Jackson 243) but when the narrator elaborates on the house, it does not sound strange. The description of the house indicates that the house itself is of a normal caliber and follows the architecture of other houses. Jackson writes that “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were form, and doors were sensibly shut.” (Jackson 243) This description of the house disputes the earlier claim that the house is “not sane.” The word sensible is even used. Adjectives that indicate order as opposed to chaos are used to describe the different aspects of the home. So what makes Hill House insane? Is it that the house is strange despite the appearance of order? Could it be that it is a house alone in the hills? I think that perhaps the house is representing a domestic role for women. Jackson says that this particular house is insane and yet the structural description of Hill House is that of a common house. This is why I think that Jackson is making a much broader judgement - that Hill House is a representation of the isolation of the domestic sphere. Things get tangled because at times it sees that Eleanor dearly wishes to be part of the house and at other times it seems that she is the house, which would conflict with the argument I’m making. One alternative is that the house consumes Eleanor because she cannot resist the expectations of society. These expectations crush her, they kill Eleanor. I’d like to continue decoding what this quote about Hill House could mean.

    As I was doing my close reading, I drew a connection I hadn’t earlier made. In the book, as the character’s are introduced and their connection to Dr. Montague’s project is explained, Eleanor is invited to Hill House because of a supernatural moment from her childhood. The moment is the following:

    “Her name had turned up on Dr. Montague’s list because one day, when she was twelve years old and her sister was eighteen, and their father had been dead for not quite a month, showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason, dropping from the ceilings, rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof. The stones continued intermittently for three days, during which time Eleanor and her sister were less unnerved by the stones than by the neighbors and sightseers who gathered daily outside the front door, and by their mother’s blind, hysterical insistence that all of this was due to malicious, backbiting people pon the block who had it out for her ever since she came.” (Jackson 245)

    Eleanor was called to Hill House because of an assault that occurred on and inside her domestic sphere when she was a child. The stones is reminiscent of Jackson’s earlier short story “The Lottery.” The description of these stones is interesting because it’s hard to imagine - the stones “dropped from the ceilings” instead of through the ceilings. The strangest part of this is that the stones defy the laws of physiques and sound to manifest out of thin air. The stoning occurs after the father dies, signifying a destabilization of the domestic order in the Vance family.

    My question is why Eleanor was invited and not her sister. If both were present, why was it only Eleanor that was invited to Hill House? Jackson provides no rationale for my question. I wonder if there is something I don’t understand in this sequence that would suggest how Eleanor alone is connected to the supernatural stones. Eleanor and her sister stayed paired throughout this sequence that means that they were in the same place for every part of the strange happening.

    The moment of the stones falling and assaulting their home is metaphor for the destabilization of the domestic sphere. As a widow, Eleanor’s mother lost her place in society. There’s also the trauma of losing a parent. The father’s death isn’t elaborated on and in this version of the story, nothing more is said about Eleanor’s father. Returning focus to Eleanor’s mother, she would have lost her significance in the community after becoming a widow. We see single women disenfranchised in other parts of the story, from the little old lady that Eleanor runs into on the street, to past women of Hill House, to Eleanor herself. That feels like a broad claim to make and I would like to back it up with some social science from the time, something for later investigation. However, it’s certainly clear that whether or not this was the reality for women and their status, it is a sentiment that is held by the story.

    The stones and the father’s death could be seen as the catalyst for Eleanor’s mother fall from grace. It seems that the same as these stones manifest out of nowhere, so does the mother’s paranoia and conviction that the neighbors are trying to do her in. The passage continues to say that “the feud with the entire neighborhood never ended” despite the end of the raining stones.

    They return to the house, but how could they return to the house if it’s in this shape? This is why I insist on reading the section about the stones as some of the appearing in the house.The house was in turmoil but this destruction had an internal origin.

    My thoughts aren’t totally clear on this section yet and needs further refinement. I’m surprised at where this tangent took me. I really hadn’t been expecting it.

~~ Also ~~ I will share something goofy and embarrassing about the first time I wrote about this book. A couple months ago I misread the passage about the stones - I thought the mother had been blind, rather than that she had been “blind” to insist that the neighbors were responsible!

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Dinner Party Talk & I’m Back in Philly!

I’m back in Philly from my visit to the Library of Congress in DC. I was able to scan/photograph the two manuscripts that are most important to my project at the moment. These two manuscripts are important because they both show the earlier stages of the story when the characters and action were much different. The protagonist did not have a set name yet and in the second draft it’s actually Theodora, a secondary character, who is the protagonist. I’m looking forward to reading these drafts after I print them out and being able to mark them up with notes.

The other night I was at a dinner party with my friends from college who have already graduated and completed their own thesis. They asked me about my summer project and I mentioned it was likely going to be my senior thesis. They had lots of advice to give me. Before I could even say the words “Genetic Criticism” in regards to ideas I’m going to look at for my word, a friend said “Please don’t try to incorporate Genetic Criticism, that would be a huge mistake.” He argued that it’s too big a concept for a thirty-page paper and that it’s not a very good concept either.

A suggestion that another friend made was to write about the texts as their own texts instead of trying to draw conclusions about the temporality and why things changed. He said it would really annoy my faculty advisor but that it was a way around Genetic Criticism.

Another friend was a philosophy major and he kept suggesting different philosophical articles for me to look at. One of them had to do with Freud and Lacan, though I can’t recall quite what this one was and I’ll have to look it up later. The other one was the “Is the Rectum a Grave?” by Leo Bersani. The stack of articles and books I have to read it growing so I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to read these.

To wrap up the post, here’s a picture of me on my last day of my first visit to the LOC. 

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Free Write from First Day of Research

I’m a little shy at the idea of sharing my amateur ideas on such a public medium, but at this point I’m pretty sure only my grandmother is reading this (Hi Grandma!) so I’ll go ahead and share some of the brainstorm writing that I did yesterday after my peripheral examination of the Jackson papers. 

I had been hoping that Oppenheimer had missed the mark when she wrote that Eleanor’s and Theodora’s relationship was originally emphasized as familiar. Indeed, it is written that “Theodora = Sister.” However, this could mean not that Theodora is simply a sister but that she is meant to replicate the relationship between Carrie and Eleanor in terms of the rivalry and competition. 

Another thing I want to address is how Eleanor’s name changed throughout the early drafts and how her personality also took different shapes. The different prototypes of the protagonist include Erica Vance and Marie Stevens. Initially while reading the draft I was confused when the changed to Marie and I thought that perhaps a new female character was introduced.

The change in name could be related to a note I saw - that it was bad to have two character’s with masculine names. What must be a note from an editor “A small quibble: shouldn’t the girls’ names be a little less similar? Masculine names with an “a” added sound alike even when they’re as different as these.”

Another interesting thing I’ve learned is that Eleanor originally had a love interest from the past. His name was Thomas. It’s interesting to see the choices that were made - it makes the queerness of the novel more deliberate. The choice to take away Thomas and take away the language about being cousins propels Eleanor and Theodora into a more intimate and taboo relationship.

I did an initial read through of the first draft. There was some difficulty in reading the draft as it appeared to be out of order and it is an a draft, after all. The confusion started after I read this note.

However, I can really see the structure of the novel come through with the list of notes that are given. In the first draft, the story opens with Eleanor (though at this point in the revision her name is still Erica) trying to get into Hill House at the gate. This scene was familiar and from my memory largely unchanged in the final draft. However, in the final draft of the story we have been introduced to Eleanor’s family and her peculiar situation before we meet the House. In the final draft, we know that Eleanor’s family does not want her to go to Hill House before we meet Hill House. This means that the final draft had more of an emphasis on familial conflict than the first draft and it also shows how her entrance to Hill House was an act of rebellion. This is something that the first draft lacks.

Unexpected fun: reading fan mail to Shirley Jackson! I thought that I would find correspondence from her and her editors, but it’s all fan mail. Very fun! Here’s a picture of some of the more lively stationary that was used to reach her.

Going back to the namesake, I need to veto an earlier hypothesis I had. This was about the namesake of Eleanor and Theodora. I had the idea that this was to conjure feelings of Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt. This was before I remembered that Eleanor Roosevelt was the wife of Franklin Roosevelt. Of course Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt are completely different presidents so I’m a little embarrassed about this slip. So there goes my theory of Jackson referencing the iconic presidential couple!

[spinstersloverslesbianshaters]

I’ll need to get higher quality scans of these, but I wanted to share some sketches I found yesterday. I’m not sure what all the sketches are, but some of these are clearly how Jackson imagined the layout of Hill House. I found an important note that said “Eleanor is House.” If Jackson continued with this method, that would mean that these sketches are a ‘floorplan’ of Eleanor. 

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This post is a day late because yesterday there was a technical problem with Tumblr. 

5/22/2017

First day at the Library of Congress! 

I’m working out of the Manuscript Reading Room in the Madison Building. 

Here’s a picture of my ID card, first page of the first draft of the novel, and the different sub folders.

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The seminar concluded and my research has begun!

On the bottom of the stack is the Oppenheimer work that will play a major role in my research. I’m already familiar with this text, I used it when writing my research paper in the fall. 

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Fellowship training has started! Here is a picture of the HHG fellows and our mentors, Nava and Sarah, on Monday. 

So far we have had a couple of different workshops. This morning we had a workshop with Professor Jamie Taylor. She gave us a process to use during the first week of research. Here’s my paraphrasing of her process:

THINGS TO TRY IN THE FIRST FIVE DAYS OF RESEARCH

1) Write first, don’t read first. The first thing in your work day should be writing.

This is because writing is the hardest part. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s quote about eating a frog - if you have to eat a frog, you might has well do it first because then you get the worst part of your day over with. (Je pense que les Français seraient en désaccord. Meh, pue importe.)

2) Write at the same time everyday. 

This is in order to get your body to direct your brain and reverse the process. Once your body is used to the routine of sitting down to write, your brain will follow through. I like the idea of this and I have no interest in following up with the science.

3) Take a break after writing and then read. 

This returns to the notion of reversal. Professor Taylor says that you can think after you work and that ruminating is important but it’s not actually working.

4) Set up things the night before.

Setting up means charging your computer, printing out the readings, etc.

5) Put your phone in the other room and cut off communications (email, social media) and do this for short duration in the beginning. 

Professor Taylor kept returning to making realistic goals for oneself. In the start of work, try working in small shifts from 20 minutes to 30 minutes a day. This can grow gradually. If you try to take on too much at once, it will be easy to get overwhelmed and give in.

Professor Taylor had us come up with two short assignments to work on in order to kick off our research. I already knew that I would be keeping this blog. In addition, I’m going to start my work by writing a summary of my project without referring to any materials. This way I can see what stands out the most to me, what I’m forgetting, and so on.