JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 246 из 359and then: Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken? I will go into a sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses trained over arbors, and find one path-jeweled, perhaps, with rubies and emeralds, soft enough for a king's daughter to walk upon with her little sandaled feet-and it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under a spell. I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return . . . . And we shall live happily ever after.
The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasy-dream. Perhaps even the happilyever- after part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that.
More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissism-weird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving force-movies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact.
Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit.
In Eleanor's life, that turning-inward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.” Eleanor immediately turns this into herself: "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same.
But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you.
I said that The House Next Door forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghost-story fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points: Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time.
The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasy-dream. Perhaps even the happilyever- after part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that.
More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissism-weird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving force-movies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact.
Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit.
In Eleanor's life, that turning-inward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.” Eleanor immediately turns this into herself: "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same.
But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you.
I said that The House Next Door forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghost-story fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points: Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time.