Trauma and the Uncanny in Shirley Jackson’s *The Haunting of Hill House*: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Reading of Repressed Female Subjectivity

To situate Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House within a Lacanian framework, it is first necessary to unpack the interwoven dynamics of trauma, the uncanny, and repressed female subjectivity as defined by Jacques Lacan’s reworking of Freudian psychoanalysis. At the core of Lacanian theory lies the Symbolic Order—the network of language, social norms, and cultural signifiers that structures human subjectivity by assigning roles and identities. For women in mid-20th-century America, this order confined female subjectivity to the “phallic function”: women were positioned as the “lack” against which male wholeness (symbolized by the phallus) is defined, reducing them to passive, domestic roles that erase their autonomous desires. Repression, in this context, occurs when a woman’s authentic needs—for agency, self-expression, or recognition beyond domesticity—are excluded from the Symbolic Order; these unacknowledged desires do not vanish but are pushed into the Real, Lacan’s domain of raw, unrepresentable experience that resists linguistic or social framing.

Trauma, for Lacan, arises when the subject is confronted with the Real, shattering the illusion of coherence provided by the Symbolic Order. Unlike Freudian trauma, which centers on a single overwhelming event, Lacanian trauma is often structural: it stems from the subject’s initial alienation from the pre-symbolic Imaginary Order (a state of imagined wholeness with the mother) and their subsequent insertion into the Symbolic, where they are forced to adopt a role that negates their true self. For women, this structural trauma is compounded by the Symbolic Order’s phallocentric bias: their exclusion from full symbolic recognition means their trauma is not just personal but systemic, rooted in the very fabric of the social norms that govern their lives. This systemic trauma manifests as a persistent sense of incompleteness, as the subject’s repressed desires in the Real press against the boundaries of the Symbolic, threatening to disrupt its fragile stability.

The uncanny, a concept Lacan adapts from Freud, emerges as the linguistic and experiential bridge between the repressed Real and the Symbolic Order. Freud defined the uncanny as the familiar made strange, but Lacan reframes it as the return of the repressed Real within the Symbolic—an intrusion of what has been disavowed into the realm of the representable. When the uncanny appears, it takes the form of signifiers that are both recognizable (tied to the subject’s lived experience) and unsettling (because they carry traces of the unrepresentable Real). For repressed female subjects, the uncanny becomes the medium through which their structural trauma is made visible: it is the “strangeness” in the familiar domestic sphere, the dissonance in a social role that feels simultaneously assigned and alien. In The Haunting of Hill House, Hill House itself functions as a Lacanian uncanny object: it is a physical structure (part of the Symbolic Order, coded as a “domestic space”) but its labyrinthine hallways, shifting dimensions, and disembodied sounds are unrepresentable within standard signifiers of home. These features are not mere supernatural flourishes; they are the Real made tangible, embodying the repressed desires and traumas of the female characters who inhabit it.

Consider Eleanor Vance, the novel’s protagonist, whose life has been confined to caring for her invalid mother—a role enforced by the mid-20th-century Symbolic Order’s expectation of women as self-sacrificing caregivers. Eleanor’s repressed desires for freedom and autonomy are pushed into the Real, and Hill House becomes the uncanny site where these desires return. The house’s seemingly sentient presence—its cold spots, the sound of children laughing, the writing on the walls (“Help Eleanor come home”)—is not a external haunting but a projection of Eleanor’s repressed Real. The phrase “Help Eleanor come home” is a uncanny signifier: it uses the familiar language of the Symbolic (the concept of “home”) but carries the unrepresentable weight of Eleanor’s desire to reclaim the pre-symbolic wholeness she lost when she was forced into the caregiver role. As the uncanny intensifies, Eleanor’s Symbolic identity (the dutiful daughter) unravels, and she is drawn deeper into the Real of the house—a process that culminates in her ambiguous death, which Lacan would interpret as a final confrontation with the Real: a rejection of the Symbolic’s phallocentric constraints, even as it destroys the subject who can no longer bear the tension between repressed desire and social expectation.

This framework reveals why The Haunting of Hill House resonates as a critique of mid-20th-century gender norms: it uses the uncanny to make visible the systemic trauma of repressed female subjectivity. By positioning the house as the uncanny return of the Real, Jackson exposes the fragility of the Symbolic Order’s phallocentric illusion, showing how the repressed desires of women—long disavowed by society—will always find a way to intrude, unsettling the very norms that seek to erase them. In doing so, the novel demonstrates that the uncanny is not just a literary device but a political one: it is the means by which the invisible traumas of marginalized subjects are brought into the light, challenging the dominant symbolic structures that perpetuate their oppression.

To unpack the construction of Hill House as Eleanor Vance’s symbolic Other, we first anchor the analysis in Jacques Lacan’s proposition that the Other functions as the carrier of the symbolic order—the network of language, norms, and social expectations that structures subjectivity by imposing lack and alienation. For Eleanor, a woman whose life has been defined by the suffocating absence of autonomous symbolic recognition (her years spent as a caregiver to her domineering, mentally controlling mother stripped her of access to a coherent self outside maternal dependency), Hill House emerges not as a mere physical space but as a materialized iteration of the Other that both mirrors her repressed trauma and mediates the return of her disavowed desires.

Hill House’s spatial characteristics, deliberately designed to resist rational comprehension, encode the fragmentation of Eleanor’s subjectivity shaped by her repressed past. Its asymmetric architecture—rooms that do not align, doorways that lead to dead ends, hallways that shift in length—refracts the disorientation of Eleanor’s childhood, where her mother’s erratic demands and emotional manipulation denied her a stable sense of self. As Eleanor observes during her first tour, “no door is where it ought to be, no window looks onto the right courtyard,” a description that echoes her own experience of growing up in a home where maternal rules were arbitrary and unspoken, leaving her perpetually uncertain of how to act to gain approval. The house’s total closure—surrounded by dense trees that block sunlight, its walls thick enough to muffle external sounds—further mirrors the isolation of Eleanor’s formative years: she spent decades confined to her mother’s bedroom, her social world reduced to the narrow orbit of a parent who viewed her as an extension rather than a separate person. This spatial closure does not merely trap Eleanor physically; it encloses her within the symbolic field of her trauma, making the house a container for the memories she has buried to survive.

The uncanny phenomena that plague Hill House—sudden cold spots, walls that seem to breathe or shift, and the faint, disembodied laughter that echoes through its halls—are not supernatural anomalies but the return of Eleanor’s repressed trauma and desires in alienated form, a manifestation of Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed” refracted through Lacan’s symbolic framework. Lacan argues that the repressed, barred from the symbolic order, returns as a disturbing, unrecognizable presence that disrupts the subject’s fragile sense of coherence; for Eleanor, these phenomena are the materialization of her disavowed need for belonging and autonomy. Consider the cold spots that cluster around her whenever she is reminded of her mother: during a late-night conversation about maternal loss, a frigid breeze settles over her shoulders, even though the windows are closed. This cold is not a physical temperature but a somatic trace of her mother’s emotional cruelty, repressed into her unconscious and now projected onto the house’s fabric. Similarly, the shifting walls that narrow her hallway when she tries to leave for town encode her fear of abandoning the only identity she has ever known (the selfless caregiver) and her hidden desire to remain in a space that finally “sees” her.

The interaction between Eleanor and Hill House deepens the house’s role as her symbolic Other, as their dynamic oscillates between her longing for belonging and the house’s insidious “summons.” From the moment Eleanor receives the invitation to join the paranormal investigation, she feels an inexplicable pull toward the house, describing it as “a place that has been waiting for me.” This sense of preordained connection stems from the house’s alignment with her repressed desire to be recognized: unlike the outside world, which dismissed her as a spinster or a burden, Hill House responds to her presence with attention—even if that attention is menacing. When she whispers “I am home” while standing in the entrance hall, the house’s walls seem to hum in agreement, a moment that marks her tentative identification with the Other. Conversely, the house “summons” her through subtle cues: the sound of a child’s laughter (echoing her own unfulfilled desire for play and innocence) leads her to the nursery, where she finds a dusty dollhouse that mirrors her mother’s controlling household; the faint tapping on her bedroom door, which she comes to associate with her mother’s nightly demands, draws her into the house’s core, where her repressed memories surface with increasing intensity.

This reciprocal relationship culminates in the house’s uncanny phenomena becoming extensions of Eleanor’s unconscious. The disembodied voice that calls her name in the dark is not an external ghost but her own repressed desire for autonomy,异化 into a spectral presence that demands she confront her past. When Eleanor finally decides to drive her car into the house’s oak tree, she does so not out of coercion but because the house, as her symbolic Other, has offered her the only form of recognition she has ever known: a merging with the space that mirrors her trauma, a final act of belonging that confirms the house’s role as the carrier of her repressed subjectivity. In this way, Hill House is not a passive setting for Eleanor’s breakdown but an active agent in the articulation of her trauma—its spatial chaos and uncanny events are the materialized language of her unconscious, speaking the desires she could never name herself.

Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory posits that the infant’s initial encounter with their reflection in a mirror marks a pivotal moment of misrecognition: the child perceives the unified, coherent image in the mirror as their “true self,” even as their embodied experience remains fragmented and uncoordinated. This misrecognition, Lacan argues, lays the foundation for the formation of the ego—a fictional construct built on the illusion of wholeness, which the subject then spends their life striving to sustain through identification with external “mirrors” (people, objects, or spaces) that reinforce this fantasy. For Eleanor Vance, the protagonist of The Haunting of Hill House, Hill House itself functions as the ultimate mirror, and its uncanny hauntings become the external projections through which she misrecognizes her fragmented subjectivity, blurring the boundaries between self and other until her identity merges with the house’s spectral space.

Eleanor arrives at Hill House as a subject already fractured by years of repressive caregiving for her invalid mother, a role that denied her the opportunity to develop an autonomous sense of self. Her existence has been defined by absence: the absence of personal agency, the absence of a coherent ego, and the absence of recognition from others. It is this lack that draws her to Hill House’s uncanny hauntings, which she unconsciously adopts as mirroring objects to fill the void of her fragmented identity. One of the earliest instances of this misrecognition occurs when she encounters a fleeting幻影 of Luke, the heir to Hill House, standing at the top of the staircase. The幻影 does not move or speak, yet Eleanor fixates on it, describing it as “a version of Luke that feels more real than Luke himself.” Lacan’s theory illuminates this moment: the幻影 is not a literal ghost but a projection of Eleanor’s own unacknowledged desires for recognition and connection. By identifying with the幻影’s silent, watchful presence, she misrecognizes it as a reflection of her own need to be seen—a need that has been suppressed by her mother’s demands. The幻影 thus becomes a mirror that seems to confirm her existence, even as it distorts her perception of reality.

As Eleanor’s stay at Hill House progresses, her misrecognition deepens, and the house’s spectral sounds—whispers in the hallways, banging on doors, the distant laughter of a child—become additional mirroring tools. These sounds, which the other guests dismiss as mere house settling or their own imaginations, resonate with Eleanor on a visceral level. She describes the whispers as “speaking directly to me, saying the things I’ve always wanted to say but couldn’t.” For Lacan, language is the medium of the symbolic order, which imposes social norms and castrates the subject by denying their full expression of desire. Eleanor’s identification with the house’s sounds is a misrecognition of her own repressed desires: the whispers are not external voices but the echo of her own unspoken needs, projected onto the house as a mirror to make them tangible. By framing these sounds as a dialogue with the house, she constructs a fantasy of being recognized—even by a spectral space—filling the lack at the core of her subjectivity.

The climax of Eleanor’s misrecognition comes when she experiences a vivid hallucination: she sees herself running through Hill House’s labyrinthine corridors, her figure darting past the dusty furniture and shadowy doorways. As she watches this “other Eleanor” run, she feels a strange sense of unity with the figure, thinking, “That’s me—that’s the me I’ve always wanted to be: free, unchained, part of the house.” Lacan would argue that this hallucination is the culmination of her mirror stage misrecognition: the running figure is not a separate entity but a projection of her fantasy of wholeness, and the house’s corridors are the mirror that reflects this fantasy back to her. In this moment, the boundary between self and house collapses entirely. Eleanor no longer sees the house as an external space; she sees it as an extension of her own identity. When she later claims, “I am Hill House,” she is not speaking metaphorically—she has fully identified with the house’s uncanny space, merging her fragmented subjectivity with the house’s spectrality.

This fusion of self and house is the logical outcome of Eleanor’s persistent misrecognition. By using the house’s hauntings as mirrors to project her repressed desires and fragmented identity, she constructs an ego based on the illusion of wholeness offered by the house. Yet, as Lacan warns, the mirror stage’s fantasy of unity is always fragile, and the subject’s striving to sustain it only deepens their alienation from their true, fragmented self. For Eleanor, this alienation becomes total: she can no longer distinguish between her own thoughts and the house’s whispers, between her own body and the house’s walls. When she drives her car into the oak tree at the end of the novel, it is not a suicide but a final act of identification—she is returning to the house, merging her physical self with the spectral space that has become her only mirror. In death, she achieves the unity she sought in life, but it is a unity rooted in misrecognition, a testament to the tragic consequences of a subject who mistakes an external uncanny space for the reflection of their true self.

To unpack Eleanor Vance’s fragmented subjectivity through Lacan’s theory of lack in the symbolic order, one must first ground the analysis in Lacan’s conceptualization of the symbolic order as a patriarchal system of language, norms, and social roles that structures human identity by assigning fixed positions—positions that, for women, are inherently marked by lack. Lacan argues that the symbolic order is governed by the “Name-of-the-Father,” a linguistic and cultural function that enforces the incest taboo, separates the child from the maternal imaginary, and assigns subjects their place within the social fabric. For women, however, this place is not a site of full recognition but of exclusion: they are defined not by their own autonomy but by their relation to male subjects (as daughter, wife, mother), rendering their subjectivity dependent on a symbolic position that never fully accommodates their desires. This lack is not a material absence but a structural void in the symbolic order itself, which denies women the language and role to articulate a self beyond patriarchal prescriptions.

Eleanor’s experience of this structural lack begins with her lifelong entrapment in the patriarchal domestic sphere of her childhood home, where her symbolic position is reduced to that of a caregiver for her invalid mother—a role that erases her individual identity long before her mother’s death. For eleven years, Eleanor abandons her own desires (to travel, to have friends, to claim a space of her own) to tend to her mother, whose demands are not merely physical but symbolic: they reinforce Eleanor’s place as a “good daughter,” a role that the Name-of-the-Father sanctions as the only legitimate position for an unmarried woman in her family. Even after her mother’s death, this symbolic entrapment persists through her sister, Caroline, who inherits the patriarchal authority of the household. Caroline refuses to return Eleanor’s savings (money Eleanor had earned caring for their mother) and dismisses her desire to leave, framing Eleanor’s longing for independence as selfish and unnatural. Here, Caroline acts as an agent of the symbolic order: she polices Eleanor’s behavior to ensure she remains confined to the role of the dependent daughter, denying her the economic and social resources needed to claim a separate symbolic position. Eleanor’s lack of a “proper” symbolic place is thus twofold: she is never recognized as an individual with her own desires, and she is denied the means to exit the family’s patriarchal structure, leaving her adrift in a symbolic void where her subjectivity cannot cohere.

This symbolic lack manifests in Eleanor’s fragmented sense of self, which she attempts to compensate for through a desperate longing for a “home”—a space that, in her imagination, would grant her the symbolic recognition she has never received. Lacan notes that the desire for home is rooted in the subject’s longing to fill the lack in the symbolic order, to find a space where their identity is fully affirmed. For Eleanor, the childhood home is a site of alienation: it is a place where she is seen only as a caregiver, not as Eleanor. This alienation fuels her obsession with Hill House, which she imagines as a “true” home—one that will recognize her uniqueness and allow her to escape the suffocating roles imposed by her family. Her initial journey to Hill House is framed as a rebellion against Caroline’s authority: she steals her sister’s car, lies about her plans, and daydreams about decorating a room in Hill House with her own things, acts that signal her desire to claim a symbolic position of her own.

Yet Hill House, far from being a refuge, reveals the chasm between Eleanor’s fantasy of home and the reality of patriarchal symbolic violence. The house’s labyrinthine architecture, its shifting walls, and its ghostly manifestations mirror the fragmented nature of Eleanor’s subjectivity, but they also enforce a new form of symbolic entrapment. The other inhabitants of Hill House—Dr. Montague, Theodora, Luke—see Eleanor not as an individual but through their own patriarchal or normative lenses: Dr. Montague views her as a case study, Theodora teases her for her naivety, and Luke dismisses her fears as hysteria. Even the house itself, which Eleanor initially imagines as a nurturing mother figure, turns on her: its ghostly sounds and shifting spaces become a metaphor for the patriarchal symbolic order’s ability to co-opt women’s desires and reconfine them. When Eleanor attempts to drive into the house’s walls at the end of the novel, this act is not merely suicide but a final, desperate attempt to fill the symbolic lack: she hopes that by merging with Hill House, she will finally find the home that the patriarchal order has denied her, even if that home is a site of destruction.

In the end, Eleanor’s tragedy is the tragedy of all women trapped in the symbolic lack of the patriarchal order: she can never articulate a coherent subjectivity because the symbolic order provides no language or position for her to do so. Her longing for home is a longing for recognition, but the only homes available to her—her childhood house and Hill House—are sites of alienation that reinforce her fragmentation. Her death is thus a testament to the violence of the symbolic order: it destroys the subjects who dare to desire a place beyond its confining roles.

To frame Hill House as a topography of repressed desire, one must first ground the analysis in Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” where he defines the term as the unsettling return of the repressed—the familiar rendered strange by its alignment with thoughts, memories, or impulses the conscious mind has disavowed. Jacques Lacan extends this framework by positing the unconscious as a “discourse of the Other,” where repressed desires are not merely forgotten but encoded in symbolic structures that repeatedly intrude upon daily life. For female subjects in mid-20th-century America, this repression often centers on the negation of autonomous desire: societal norms confined women to the roles of wife, mother, and domestic caretaker, erasing their right to pursue individual agency, sexual autonomy, or unmediated self-expression. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House materializes this psychic repression, transforming abstract Lacanian lack into a physical space where the uncanny acts as a symptom of unresolved trauma.

Hill House’s architectural uncanny is the first layer of this topography. Designed by Hugh Crain, a patriarch who weaponized domesticity to control his daughters, the house defies rational spatial logic: doorways open to walls, hallways stretch or contract without warning, and windows reflect distorted versions of the outside world. These anomalies are not mere Gothic flourishes; they mirror the fragmented psyche of the female subject whose desire has been split from her conscious self. For Eleanor Vance, the novel’s protagonist, Hill House’s disorientation resonates with her own lifelong entrapment: she spent decades caring for her invalid mother, her own desires—for friendship, independence, and belonging—compressed into the silent drudgery of care work. When she enters Hill House, the house’s labyrinthine layout becomes a metaphor for her repressed unconscious: every dead end and mirrored surface forces her to confront the parts of herself she has disavowed. The uncanny here is not just the house’s strangeness, but its familiarity—its ability to mirror the psychic cage Eleanor has inhabited her entire life.

The house’s supernatural phenomena further embody the uncanny return of repressed female desire. The disembodied cries that echo through the halls, the cold spots that cling to Eleanor’s skin, and the writing scrawled on the walls (“HELP ELEANOR COME HOME”) are not random hauntings; they are the voices of the house’s female ghosts—Crain’s daughters, their lives truncated by patriarchal violence—whose repressed desires have coalesced into a collective psychic force. Lacan argues that the unconscious speaks through symptoms, and these phenomena are symptoms of the house’s own traumatic history: Hugh Crain’s daughters were denied education, social contact, and any form of agency, their desires for freedom reduced to silent suffering. When Eleanor arrives, these ghosts recognize in her a kindred spirit—another woman whose desire has been suffocated—and their uncanny intrusions are an attempt to drag her repressed self into the light. For Eleanor, the voices are both terrifying and seductive: they validate her unspoken longing to be seen, even as they threaten to unravel her fragile grip on sanity. This tension is quintessentially uncanny: the ghosts are familiar because they embody Eleanor’s own repressed impulses, and their strangeness stems from her conscious refusal to acknowledge them.

Eleanor’s eventual merging with Hill House is the culmination of this topography of desire. As she succumbs to the house’s pull, her repressed desires—for belonging, for being desired, for escaping the invisibility of her past—surface with violent intensity. The iconic line “Hill House is not sane” (Jackson 1) is a misdirection: the house is not insane, but a repository of the sanity the world denied its female inhabitants. Eleanor’s decision to stay in Hill House, to let the walls swallow her, is not a surrender to madness; it is a recognition that the house is the only space where her repressed desire can exist. The uncanny here reaches its apex: the familiar (the desire for belonging) returns as the strange (a supernatural fusion with a haunted house), and Eleanor’s death is not a tragedy but a symbolic act of reclaiming her desire from the patriarchal forces that sought to erase it.

In this reading, Hill House is more than a haunted mansion; it is a Lacanian symptom made flesh. The uncanny is not an end in itself, but a manifestation of the trauma of female repression—proof that the repressed cannot stay buried forever. By materializing the unconscious, Jackson reveals that mid-20th-century America’s domestic ideal was itself an uncanny construct: a familiar facade hiding the violent erasure of female desire. Hill House’s uncanny thus becomes a political act, forcing readers to confront the trauma of a society that reduced women to ghosts in their own homes.