December 10, 2024 • by Fei Yang
presented at the UCI Comparative Literature Undergraduate Conference in Critical Theory on May 15, 2025
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) utilizes spectrality to make a defense against non-normative female desire as an unseen supernatural threat while at the same time articulating it in a mode that exceeds normative understanding. I begin by analyzing how the film reproduces Cold War fears of lesbianism and non-normative constructions of womanhood by establishing an association between its two female leads and the pathologized house. I then take a closer look at the film’s cinematic language, applying Dennis Giles’ concept of figural categories to read its deployment of the spectral in connection with the period’s understanding of lesbianism, particularly the figure of the femme, as an invisible threat. Finally, I propose that the film also opens up space for the expression of lesbianism in an alternative mode that is irreducible to patriarchal forms of understanding queerness.
Discussions about Cold War America often neglect to mention the effects of the Red Scare and McCarthyism on cultural anxieties surrounding homosexuality. During this period, fears regarding deviant gender and sexual identities became enmeshed with fears regarding the spread of communism, creating new narratives of queerness as a threat to democracy. Hollywood, especially horror cinema, served an important role during this moral panic as an ambivalent ideological apparatus that simultaneously reproduced and challenged these homophobic fears. One site where such ideological tensions emerged is Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting. In the film, paranormal investigator Dr. Markway invites a small group of people to study Hill House, which has a history of women dying mysterious deaths within its walls. The two women of the group are Eleanor, the film’s protagonist whose mother recently died, and Theodora, who is a lesbian and a psychic. The Haunting uses spectrality to defend against non-normative female desire as an unseen supernatural threat, while at the same time articulating it in a mode that exceeds normative understanding.
The film reproduces the notion of lesbianism as a threat by connecting it with the supernatural occurrences of the house. Dr. Markway describes Hill house as “sick,” “diseased,” and “born evil.” The film utilizes anamorphic lenses which distort the final camera image; the barrel distortion bends geometric lines in the extremities of a shot, and this warping contributes to the eerie sense that the house is wrong in some way. It doesn’t orient itself like a typical house. It was constructed with off-center hinges, “all the angles are slightly off,” its walls and doors aren’t quite ‘straight’. This idea of the house being diseased resonates with the notion of queerness as an unnatural form of being, a deviation from the biological norm. As Patricia White (1991) argues in her article “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: ‘The Haunting’,” the film strengthens this queer resonance by establishing a connection between the house and its two female leads (156). After Theodora makes several romantic advances at Eleanor, Eleanor eventually accuses Theodora of being “the monster of Hill House” and one of “nature’s mistakes.” But Eleanor is shown to be projecting this monstrosity onto Theo, doing everything she can to deny the fact that she herself is the monster of the house. She is at the center of every supernatural occurrence; it’s her name that is written on the walls. As White (1991) notes, both the house and Theo have an affinity for Eleanor, and these attractions are linked to each other and conveyed as similarly threatening (157). The film’s insistence on lesbianism as a threatening disease reflects the homophobic anxieties in the US at the time of its production in the late 1950s. In his book Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema, Robert Corber (2011) discusses how the lesbian was constructed as “‘un-American’, a secretive, duplicitous figure who, like the communist, threatened to subvert the nation” (17). Lesbianism was linked to feminism, as both destabilized patriarchal institutions such as marriage and the traditional family model. Corber (2011) describes how “Hollywood films contributed to the homophobic deployment of the category of the lesbian by constructing narratives of female sexuality that pathologized women’s desire for independence and thereby reinforced the difficulty that women had imagining alternative modes of happiness and fulfillment” (19). This is reflected in The Haunting, as the diseased house is not only pathologized in relation to Eleanor’s latent lesbianism but also her desire for autonomy. The house literally echoes the guilt she feels for becoming frustrated with the burden of caring for her dying mother, a frustration that is intimately linked to her fantasies about having her own home. The ghosts recreate the sound of Eleanor’s mother pounding on the wall for help just before her death, a plea that Eleanor had chosen to ignore. The film’s linking of the diseased house and deviant female desire thereby reflects the period’s pathologization of non-normative constructions of womanhood.
The film’s cinematic deployment of the spectral can be read using Dennis Giles’ figural categories to understand its depiction of Eleanor as a latent lesbian, specifically as an instantiation of the unseen threatening figure of the femme. During the first night at the house, Eleanor rushes to Theo’s room when she hears pounding on her wall. The two of them sit in bed, clutching each other in fear for an extended period of time. Our perspective remains restricted to their side of the door. The film frustrates our ability to view the source of these sounds, and the audience derives pleasure from the excitement of being denied this vision. We want to see the horror, and at the same time we are afraid to see it. As Dennis Giles (1984) writes in his essay “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema,” “The fetishistic act is the means by which the subject protects himself/herself against a horrible spectacle, and gains pleasure from a vision which stops short of this spectacle” (47). The film delivers its audience the pleasure of not seeing: it never shows us the causes of the supernatural forces, and it also never shows us anything beyond socially acceptable homosocial interactions between these two women. Giles (1984) describes how cinema “promises a vision which the viewer knows will be psychologically and ideologically safe. By the terms of the viewing contract, desire will be engaged, then domesticated by the textual strategies... Cinema is never the raw vision of desire, but a compromised text which defends itself (and the viewer) against its own promise (or threat)” (39). The film keeps the true object of horror hidden from the viewer and gives them the fetishistic relief of seeing a subsituted signifier of it. The scene depicts the two women in a highly intimate physical arrangement; at the same time, it is a representation of female homosociality that can be defended as nothing more than platonic. These elements of The Haunting reflect the era’s anxieties around lesbianism specifically as an unseen danger. Corber (2011) writes that “the lesbian posed an ‘invisible’ threat to the nation; because she could pass as ‘normal’, the lesbian could participate in the nation’s social and economic institutions without arousing suspicion” (3). Giles’ figural analysis has particular resonance with the figure of the femme, which was previously understood as the less “abnormal” lesbian but replaced the butch as the greater threat to American society during the Cold War. Corber (2011) writes, “Unlike the femme, the butch was easily identified by her cross-gender identification, which prevented her from participating in mainstream American society and from recruiting other women to the ‘secret world’ of lesbianism as easily as the femme could” (4). The femme could operate unseen, thus making her more dangerous. This invisible quality of lesbianism is conveyed in the film, which uses the female homosociality of Eleanor and Theo as a fetishistic stand-in for an overt depiction of queer intimacy, defending the audience from their desire to see the real object of horror. Similarly, in the film, Eleanor herself misreads and misplaces her desire onto Dr. Markway as a defense mechanism because he serves as her protective father figure (White 1991, 162). Nonetheless, her attempts to align her sexuality with social norms continue to be haunted by the spectral. Eleanor feels the threatening presence of her unconscious desires; at the same time, the audience feels the threatening presence of Eleanor as a femme-presenting latent lesbian. The film arouses and then soothes this fear by civilizing the object of its fantasy, offering the viewer a revised signifier of the threat in order to defend the viewer against it.
Despite its defense against homosexuality, the film also offers a space for the expression of non-normative female desires by suggesting that Eleanor’s sexuality cannot be reduced to patriarchal modes of understanding. Dr. Markway’s only interest in the ghosts of Hill house lies in determining whether they even exist, and throughout the film he consistently denies the presence of ghosts despite Eleanor and Theo’s repeated complaints. In the final scene after Eleanor dies, Dr. Markway says, “[Hill House] didn’t want her to leave, and her poor bedeviled mind wasn’t strong enough to fight it. Poor Eleanor!” But Theo rejects his interpretation, saying, “Maybe not ‘poor Eleanor.’ It was what she wanted, to stay here. She had no place else to go. The house belongs to her now, too. Maybe she’s happier.” Compared to Dr. Markway, Theo has a privileged epistemic standing in relation to Eleanor, and as White argues, this allows her to view Eleanor’s death in an alternative way that does not deprive her of her agency (White 1991, 188). Throughout the film, Dr. Markway can be read as representing dominant, outsider perspectives on queerness. Eleanor’s death can subsequently be understood as a refusal to be contained by these dominant modes. Her association with the supernatural means that her queerness exceeds explanation (White 1991, 188). The Haunting’s construction of the lesbian thereby threatened to destabilize understandings of queerness perpetuated during the Cold War. The specter of lesbianism evokes the terror of not just the invisible, but the supernatural: not just what lies concealed beneath normative appearances, but what lies beyond normative forms of articulation.
Since its inception, Hollywood has played a key part in systems of ideological production. The Haunting expresses conflicting ways of thinking about lesbianism, deploying the spectral in order to depict queer female desires as an invisible threat to the nation while simultaneously offering a space for its expression outside of normative understandings of queerness. Horror cinema is a crucial site for reading the unstable construction of gender and sexuality categories as they are shaped by political regimes and cultural anxieties, not only across different eras but even within the contradictions of a single era.
Works Cited
Corber, Robert J. Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema. New York: Duke University Press, 2011.
Giles, Dennis. “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, 38-49. London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984.
Johnson, David K. “Panic on the Potomac.” In The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, 1-14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
White, Patricia. "Female Spectator, Lesbian Spectre: The Haunting." In Women in Film Noir, 142-172. London: Routledge, 1991.
Wise, Robert, director. The Haunting. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1963.