The Haunting of Hill House - Anger is the mask of hurting

Almost the first

Shirley is the second of Crain’s children, as such, she ends up having a role more or less like Steve’s in the family chain. She also plays a role as the oldest and is a skeptic to all supernatural phenomena like him. The episode begins hinting at this, putting Shirley in a situation that mirrors her older brother in the previous episode.

She has to listen someone’s ghost story, this time a boy who just lost his grandma to cancer, while dismissing this as a product of his imagination. The boy is scared to see his grandma again after she died, but Shirley goes on to reassure that this is a great opportunity for him to have a last good image of her because she is going to make her look perfect.

“The thing about an open casket, (...) is that it’s a great chance to take all of those pictures in your head (...) and... cover it all up with a better picture.”

This affirmation as it’s said by Shirley, allows us to start seeing her core conflict, perfectionism. This episode is all about confronting death in different ways and how we deal with grief as children and as adults.

Perfect is the enemy of good

Shirley’s perfectionism is a manifestation of her need to mask death’s ugliness and make everything look impeccable again. That’s essentially why she becomes a mortician and her road to start working with death has important pinpoints we have to look at.

The first one is the situation with the kittens. In the flashbacks, while exploring Hill House, Shirley finds 5 abandoned kittens in a room near a wasp nest. She gets scared by the nest and screams, causing her dad and Mr. Dudley to go after her. What then proceeds is a conversation about how it’s difficult for the kittens to survive without their mom, so Shirley asks her dad if she can keep them. He is reluctant in the beginning but then agrees.

Shirley takes care of the kittens with her siblings at night, but when she wakes up, she finds one of them is dead. She becomes distressed by this and her parents help her arrange a funeral while teaching her about what people do when their loved ones die. She says some words to the kitten and it seems she is almost at ease with the situation when the kitten suddenly starts to move, making her believe it is alive. We then see it was actually a spider coming out of its mouth, which prompts her to scream.

The meaning of spiders

To understand what happened metaphorically we can draw upon two common meanings of the spiders throughout cultures. The first one is that spiders symbolize fear. When a spider appears, it represents the need to confront one’s phobias and if that is not done properly, the fear resurfaces later. Hold onto that notion because it will be very important to tie everything together.

After the funeral, Shirley discovers all the other kittens, but one, are dead as well. Olivia, fearing for what could happen, takes the last one and kills it, but instead of telling her daughter what happened, she lies and tells her she gave it away. That causes a spur of anger in Shirley, but more important, at least, for now, it causes her to not confront her fear of death properly. This lack of closure makes death reappear later with her mom, and her sister. In the last case a spider also comes out of her sister’s corpse, symbolizing the return of this unconfronted phobia.

The second interpretation about spiders is that they are associated with negative aspects of your personality, what psychologists call your shadow self. Shirley not being able to confront her negative side is a direct path to her anger. Her rage towards her mom when she said she gave the last kitten away, is an indicator of her anger towards her siblings and everyone who does something that doesn’t appease her in the following years. Most of all, it is a distraction to the anger she feels the most: for herself.

As said in the previous article it is a confirmed theory that each sibling represents one of the five stages of grief, Shirley, no surprise is anger. What is said about this stage is that it is something to hold on to after the numbness of loss. This numbness is apparent while Shirley is preparing Nell’s body to the funeral. She just lost her sister, but she does the job anyway because she feels she needs to be in control of something and her perfectionism makes her feel like she’s the only one that can do it properly.

This perfectionism is what intensifies her anger at herself, because she is not able to make peace with the fact that she makes mistakes, like cheating on her husband or not being able to help Nell.

The implications of anger

Even though anger is a stage after denial, which means there’s a level of acknowledgement of the situation, there’s also a great deal of repression. One indication of the way Shirley represses her feelings is her habit of talking while sleeping. This can be a depiction of how she is aware of the things that bother her but subconsciously chooses to misdirect her anger, not being able to face her own fears.

But even though her anger is linked to her problems with herself, it is also related to lack of closure. She wasn’t able to have closure with her kittens’ death so she misdirected her resentment towards her mom. Later she did the same with her mom’s death, directing her fury to her father, and with her sister’s death, directing her rage at her other siblings.

In a way, this episode shows things coming full circle, with the return of the spider in Nell’s body. In some cultures, the spider is considered a symbol of the infinite because of the number of its legs,8. This represents the cycle of anger Shirley goes through and it can be also a nod to the show’s depiction of nonlinear time.

Lack of closure is a common thing in our lives. How many times can we truly say we had the opportunity to end matters with someone or a situation in a satisfactory way? It is part of life to understand that yes, we have to live doing our best, but sometimes our best is not enough. Sometimes it is not the most beautiful picture or the best version of ourselves.

Breaking out of the cycle of anger means making peace with ugliness and imperfection. The name of the episode, open casket, can be interpreted as an affirmation that sometimes that’s all we’re left with. Like Pandora’s box, there’s no going back to beauty and naivety after it is open.

Shirley repressed herself to try to mask death’s ugliness, but even though she can make people appear perfect while dead, in the end we all know that we can’t hide the truth. All the beauty in the world can’t hide the ugliest truths forever and growing up emotionally means being able to feel the ugliness and still want to live in this imperfect world, while finding joy in it.