id: All of these manifestations and descriptions combine to make the Hill House of Jackson's final version a house of delusions of family. Hill House will be glad to give you a hand to hold in the night, someone to be there, a sense of belonging. When it is too late, you will realize that all along you were really alone, clinging to your enemy–or to nothing at all. The house's furnishings have "hands everywhere," Luke says: "Little soft glass hands, curving out to you, beckoning-" (209). So do its ghosts. In a scene that Jackson marks as containing the "key" to the book (1D), Eleanor clutches Theodora's hand as she works up the courage to cry out against the torture of a ghostly child. She suddenly looks up to see Theodora on the other side of the room. She screams, "Whose hand was I holding?" (162-163). The horror behind Eleanor's scream is not that she was alone in the dark, but that she believed herself to have someone there.

tricia lootens, whose hand was i holding?: familial and sexual politics in shirley jackson's the haunting of hill house