Jennifer Foehner Wells
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Hell House by Richard Matheson--Product of its Time?

2/4/2022

8 Comments

 
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(Warning for readers of this blog who are not my classmates: there are spoilers in this post. Read at your own risk.)

While I don’t read a lot of horror, this isn’t my first book by Richard Matheson. I knew going in that Matheson, who published this book in 1971 and passed in 2013, was “a product of his time,” as is so often said to excuse deceased white men who made terrible choices. I
read I Am Legend just a few years ago. And, yeah, I noted that his protagonist Neville liked to only experiment on female vampire-zombies and how he sealed his vampire-zombified wife up in a living tomb. It bothered me only a little at the time.

In the past I read for pleasure, not to analyze or pick apart a book or a novelist. But I’m more than just a casual reader working to maintain my geek cred now. I’m an MFA student and a professional author that works very hard to be inclusive in my own books. And in this book, Hell House—considered by many to be a cult classic—Matheson lets his misogynist-racist-homophobic flags fly. So while I’m sure a lot of people are sick of people writing about these issues that exist in our favorite books from the past, given who I am and what I believe in, if I’m assigned to write about this book, I’m going to focus on these issues. If we don’t ever talk about these things, they’ll never change. And while I enjoyed reading this book, certain elements are extremely problematic whether Matheson wrote them consciously or not. We look to our idols to help us form our ideals. So, let’s highlight them.
 
We can start with little things. Incidental patriarchy, let’s call it. Both female characters in this book are nearly always referred to only by their first names. The men? Almost always by their surnames—or in the case of Dr. Barrett, by his surname plus his honorific. I've noticed this tendency in my own writing and have wrestled with what it means. I've concluded that innately this is a tendency to be more personal when it comes to women and to give more respect to men.

In addition, Dr. Barrett dismisses everything Florence says—at times even before she says it. Since Fischer, as her colleague, says next to nothing in her defense, she has no one backing her up or questioning Barrett--a missed opportunity for tension. In addition, instead of doing the job he’s being paid to do—work with Florence—Fischer says she should just go home. In fact, at one point Fischer makes the statement that Florence was the weakest link of the four of their party. If that were the case, as the most experienced medium when it came to Hell House, shouldn't it have been his duty to encourage working together and deciding together about safety measures that could be taken?
 
Moving on to characterization. We know little of Edith except that she nearly killed herself once when her husband went away without her for a week. We are supposed to believe that she is so mentally weak that loneliness nearly drove her to suicide—and it never once occurred to her to go visit a friend or anything. Barrett, her husband, seems to be aware of her lack of mental fortitude because he doesn’t want to leave her alone for a minute. She’s a fearful clingy wife with a weak constitution and an innate proclivity to alcoholism when under stress, who needs the presence of her husband to survive. That’s her characterization.
 
Florence’s characterization is just as flawed, though it is developed far more. She is depicted as an impulsive, reckless, idealist religious zealot. She believes that the souls trapped in Hell House can be freed by love alone if she just prays enough. She keeps herself “open” to the entity inside Hell House despite knowing the history of what had happened there (and her female predecessor that committed suicide after three days inside the house). Florence is so gullible, she invites a whining wheedling ghost to ‘make love to her’ because that’s what he says he needs to be free. I mean, most women have heard that sort of talk before, usually in the backseat of a car, as a teenager. Most women wouldn't fall for it. Both female characters take their turn playing Ophelia, wandering around the house alone muttering their paranoia. Both exist to be watched over, rescued, and to make stupid mistakes of the sort that the men do not make at all--like sleep walking to their near-death, or stripping naked in front of a stranger while her husband is upstairs sleeping, or inviting a spirit to have sex with her.

To Matheson's credit, the men aren't exonerated from making stupid mistakes. Dr. Barrett's fatal mistake is being too certain in his convictions (that's not how science works, boys and girls--scientists are always aware that their theory could be proven incorrect). Fischer, on the other hand, is depicted to be just as weak as the women, though in other ways. He enters the house and does absolutely nothing--which he admits by the end of the book. This is a self-protective measure that makes him look like an inconsiderate, selfish coward. Of course he manages some introspection and bravery by the end--after his aha moment.
 
I expected to be shocked and horrified when I read this book. That's part of the fun of the horror genre. I did not expect that shock and horror to be in the form of sexual violence against women. The men in this book are attacked by the invisible entity inside Hell House multiple times, but never in a sexually-violent way. Florence, however, is first raped by a ghost who then possesses her and then later is raped again by the enormous-phallus-adorned statue of Jesus in the chapel. To escape the possession and the knowledge that she foolishly allowed Belasco to trick her and rape her more than once, she commits suicide—just when we’re beginning to hope they’ll all get out of there alive, too. She's not entirely useless, though. She used the knowledge gained as she's dying to leave a clue for the other members of the party.

Personally, if the men in the story had got their genitals messed with a bit, all the raping wouldn't be quite so problematic. But the men get burned, bruised, cut, knocked out cold, and drowned--but their penises remain entirely unviolated. Lucky for them. I think penile mutilation would be fairly horrific. Is it too horrific for a man to write?
 
Let’s move on to homophobia. Matheson reveals that Edith’s father was thwarted in an attempt to rape her when she was younger and that her mother instilled in her a disgust for sex—both of which Edith believes put the seed in her mind that she might have tendencies toward lesbianism and ultimately led her to marry an impotent man. She seeks to prove that she isn’t a lesbian by attempting to seduce Fischer twice. I acknowledge that the way American culture viewed homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s made life more difficult for gay folks. So, while the feeling of fearing oneself might be gay because one became aroused in the presence of a naked body of the same biological sex is actually realistic for the time period, it’s simply not necessary to the plot. The whole book is full of gore and debauchery—Matheson is stacking lesbianism right up there on the debauchery side. Not okay.
 
And finally we move to the topic of racism. Florence’s spirit guide is an “Indian” who does everything but say “How.” (Háu is a Lakota greeting that was adopted by popular culture as a part of the trappings of caricatures of Native Americans. It was used a lot in popular culture from the 50s to the 70s.) Matheson even employs broken speech and incomplete sentences. There is no reason—plot, character, or otherwise—for her spirit guide to be Native American except that it’s a stereotype and Americans liked to portray Native Americans as being spiritual and shamanistic back then. It’s lazy writing. The spirit guide could have been anyone of any ethnicity—or no identifiable ethnicity at all. It just wasn’t an important part of the plot. If he felt it was needed for the words the spirit guide said to be hard to understand or obscure it would have been easy enough to do that employing any number of devices—like poetic speech, flowery speech, antique vernacular, foreign languages, or unknown terminology—any of those would still have allowed Fischer to have his aha moment at the end of the novel, if carefully devised.
 
In the end, it is a man (Fischer) who finally figures out what was actually going on all along and defeats the entity with mere insults. A man developed the device that actually would work against spirits haunting a house (if the male spirit hadn’t been so prescient and devious as to kill himself by locking himself inside a secret lead-lined room to prevent his own dissipation.
 
I suppose one might think that I didn’t enjoy reading the novel because of all of these issues. Quite the contrary. This was written to be pure entertainment and it was highly entertaining to read. But as modern thinking people we can’t keep giving these old books a pass because they were a product of their time. Instead we have to learn to say: you’ll love reading Hell House by Richard Matheson. It’s a fun read. But also give the caveat: be aware of the existence of sexism, racism, homophobia, and sexual violence against women within those pages.

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8 Comments
Kat Craig
2/5/2022 07:06:44 am

Oh, Jen--the Native American spirit with the broken English was so bad! I cringed.

It's a fun read, but it's certainly a time capsule of outdated thinking and stereotypes.

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Jen Foehner Wells link
2/6/2022 02:12:30 am

Time capsule is right! I was switching back and forth between reading on my kindle and listening to whispersync. Ray Porter is one of the best audiobook narrators I've ever heard and he happens to be the narrator on this one. He really did his best with that scene. He got the fake "Indian" accent just right. He's so outrageously talented with his voice. But even with that dazzling performance, I was appalled. :D

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Scott A. Johnson link
2/5/2022 10:28:31 am

Excellent analysis. You are absolutely correct.

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Michelle
2/6/2022 03:52:27 pm

Jen-
You did such a complete job of describing the problems with the book. I wonder if there were any feminists in the 70s who wrote critiques about this book. All of the issues are so glaring, I suspect there must have been some enlightened people who had opinions. Thank you for sharing your opinions.

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Jennifer Wells link
2/7/2022 12:54:02 pm

Michelle,

I suspect that feminists in the 70s wouldn't be caught dead reading popular fiction, but I could totally be wrong about that! It's just a vibe I have gotten from reading feminist texts of that era--women were seeking to be taken seriously and worked very hard to prove they were every bit as smart as men. If they read genre fiction like this, I suspect it was a guilty pleasure and silent outrage.

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Lee Allen Howard link
2/7/2022 10:15:16 am

Wow, Jen. Excellent analysis. You prompted so many thoughts as I read, I had to draft this in Word.

Matheson was born nearly a century ago. He wrote I Am Legend in 1954, so, yes, it’s outdated. Stephen King, who’s politically liberal, has early material marred by sexism, homophobia, and “incidental patriarchy” as you called it. (I believe this came more from his characters than his personal beliefs.) Hell House was published in 1971, but Matheson could have incorporated more of the liberation that women were pursuing in the 1960s.

Barrett does dismiss everything Florence says—and believes. His chauvinism (incidental or purposeful) is compounded by his greater problem: blind devotion to science. Both Florence and Barrett were fanatical about their beliefs. But, of the two, Barrett was more close-minded than Florence, a typical (for that time) man who “knows everything and is convinced he’s right.” He worshiped science more religiously than Florence did Spiritualism.

All Matheson’s characters are flawed. Both men were. Fischer by the chip on his shoulder that kept him from doing anything constructive through nearly the entire book. He continuously failed to stand up for what he believed and refused to do his job like the others. In accusing Florence of being “the weakest link,” he displaced his own guilt. Of the two mediums, he was the least active and uncommitted to clearing the house. But as a researcher, Barrett was the weakest link among the three, tragically destroyed because of his blinkered, overweening pride.

The women were likewise flawed. Although Edith was portrayed as an inherently weak character, guilty of the faults you pointed out that Matheson had burdened her with, her character arc redeemed her from her ignorant devotion to her husband’s intellect; she saw through his flaws in the end. As a repressed “innocent,” I found her susceptibility to Belasco’s spirit, to the point she stripped and tried to seduce Fischer, a cheap way to show something titillating for heterosexual male readers. To his credit, Fischer never took advantage of Edith in his thoughts or actions. In this case, I don’t view protecting a vulnerable character as chauvinism. (Matheson’s depiction of women as needing their virtue and persons protected is another story.)

Despite her weaknesses, Florence, especially, also had great strengths. You mentioned that Florence “is depicted as an impulsive, reckless, idealist religious zealot.” True, but mostly by Barrett. In her POV scenes where she’s alone, her strong beliefs do drive her actions, which sometimes lack caution. But I feel Matheson portrayed her without guile, sincere throughout. This could be seen as a flaw, but she came off as the most genuine of all the characters. Her primary fault is wanting to believe the best of and desiring to help what turned out to be a mendacious, seducing spirit. She did allow the incubus’s advances to ruin her—but only after several scenes of “No, no, no.”

Both women became sexual victims because Belasco, the predatory male in the spirit world, attacked them. I see this as the main reason Barrett and Fischer got off easy. (But, then again, if Belasco was so debauched, why weren’t the men fair game? The phallus could have ended up in Barrett’s arrogant butt…)

I’m a gay horror writer. LGBTQ characters appear in my fiction, but they don’t get a free pass from being challenged and tortured according to their fears. I paint them as flawed as the cis hetero characters I create.

Horrifying to me is homophobic verbal, mental, spiritual, and physical abuse. It’s the same for my queer characters—but any such abuse is inflicted by other antagonistic characters. The presence of homophobia in a fictive work usually doesn’t trigger me. However, Matheson carts out lesbianism as an aberration and a threat to female purity—in the eyes of protagonistic characters. I’ve discovered in studying omniscient POV that a writer can get away with antisocial views expressed by characters or a character-narrator in first or close third. But when a writer takes an objectional stance through an external narrator who is not a character in the story (as Matheson does with third-person subjective omniscient in Hell House), it’s tantamount to airing his own views.

A last comment about Red Cloud. Portraying a Native American spirit guide is a stereotype, but it’s not one of Matheson’s—it belongs to Spiritualism, which he portrayed accurately (see my final note at https://leeallenhoward.com/third-person-subjective-omniscient-pov-in-hell-house/).

In the early days of Spiritualism, many Native American spirits allegedly made “appearances” in seances, ostensibly still wandering the ether from the decimation of tribal people during Ame

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Jennifer Wells link
2/7/2022 01:49:15 pm

Lee,

I found your comment to be so thought provoking! I, too, composed my reply in Word.

I haven’t yet read Stephen King, but I’m not surprised by your statement that his early work has those flaws. It’s the “product of his time” thing again. When we know better we do better. I certainly didn’t spring forth from the womb understanding all this stuff. It takes years to recognize our own internal prejudices and to work to counteract them. I’m still working on it every day.

You are absolutely correct in saying that Barrett dismissing everything Florence says is part of his characterization. I freely admit that I was wrong about that. That particular aspect shouldn’t be counted as a ding against Matheson. I also agree that all of Matheson’s characters are flawed—as they should be. That makes for far more interesting—and realistic—reading. So while Barrett’s attitude toward Florence chafed, it—as you say—isn’t necessarily Matheson talking. It’s Barrett.

I found Edith’s transformation too simple, too quick. She had not to that point demonstrated that kind of emotional capacity. I do think that Matheson saying that she nearly committed suicide after a week alone is hyperbolic. Maybe people exist out there, functioning in the world with a problem that enormous, but I’ve never met one. I don’t think she needed to be weak to such an extent to believe that Belasco was influencing her behavior. Repressed innocent would have been more than enough. Any healthy young woman denied sex for a lifetime—even if she agreed to it—may have momentary doubts that Belasco could have coaxed and exploited. Depicting women as being weak-willed and unable to live without their male counterpart is just a step too far. Just my opinion.

Florence was probably the most developed 3-dimensional character in the novel and I was rooting for her. I found her to be impulsive and reckless though, even outside of Barrett’s assessment. The very first time the spirit manifested in her room that should have been reported immediately and discussed in detail between her, Barrett, and Fischer. Every contact with the entity should have been treated the same way. Perhaps witnesses should have remained with her at all times, or recording devices. Maybe that’s my scientific bias talking. But they were supposed to be on a mission to prove something and proof requires evidence.

(see next comment--I don't know how many characters this little box will allow)

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Jennifer Wells
2/7/2022 01:50:18 pm

Saying “no, no, no, yes” is about the same, in my opinion, as the word no not meaning no. Giving in to whining and wheedling... agreeing to sex with a ghost... that’s reckless and impulsive. Like I said, most women have heard that kind of pleading from teenaged boys when they were teenaged girls. This wasn’t her first rodeo.

Okay—YES. According to Matheson-logic, gayness was up there with debauchery. Belasco was said to have “done it all.” So why not? I think it’s because it made him uncomfortable and he feared he’d be suspected of being gay himself. Unfortunately that was an era of American machismo where even suspected queerness could cause a lot of trouble for people.
I really like the point you make about how POV is handled and the distinction between a character and an author speaking. I knew that, of course, and should have taken that into more consideration when I wrote this essay. I appreciate the reminder and I now regret my kneejerk reaction to a couple of my points. Good job pointing that out astutely and kindly. You will make a wonderful teacher if you decide to go that route.

Not having read much horror, I hadn’t really thought about how horror would mean such different things for people from different walks of life. That was SUCH an intriguing point and so illuminating, I suspect I’ll be thinking about it a lot in the coming days. I guess I always thought horror was generally treated as something that tapped into our lizard brain, but it makes sense that it can be much more sophisticated than that. Now I really want to read your work!

Also thank you for the point about the Native American spirit guide and the historical association with Spiritism. I saw that when I read your blog post and I was grateful for the education. I was raised without any religion and though as an adult I attempted to educate myself about many world religions to have a baseline of understanding Spiritism is one I missed. I still don’t think that excuses Matheson though. That was a horrible depiction, but at least I understand the background now.

This “product of his time” business is tough stuff. Like I said at the beginning of this post: when we know better, we do better. How many passes do we give people? How do we evaluate literature of past eras in that context when the culture of all the bad -isms was so prevalent? I don’t want to be crowned queen of -IsmDecisionTown.

I think the only way we can possibly approach this is by still reading the books and pointing these things out. Whether a book brings up an issue intentionally or not, a reading is made by a reader—an individual. They take their meaning through a filter of their own life experiences. Every person decides for themself. Talking about it, sharing ideas, helps people grow in their ability to understand.

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    Jennifer Foehner Wells

    I'm an author of the space-opera variety.

    This secondary blog was written for a course required as part of my Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University.

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