Eleanor Vance arrives at Hill House hoping to create her own identity. At 32-years-old, she has spent the last 11 years caring for her ill, abusive mother; since her mother’s recent death, she has lived in the nursery of her sister’s house. Early chapters reveal that her sister and brother-in-law are domineering and manipulative. As she drives down the road toward Hill House in the car she’s taken against her sister’s will, she thinks, “I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step” (10). She revels in the drive, during which she is free to dream and imagine, enjoying the fact that “the car belonged entirely to her, a little contained world all her own” (10). She feels “[t]he journey itself was her positive action,” even if “her destination [is] vague, unimagined perhaps nonexistent” (11).

Once at Hill House, Eleanor struggles with almost crippling insecurity and self-doubt. Waking up the first morning, she worries that she “said silly things” and that “the others had been amused to see that she was so simple” (68). When Theodora tells her that she was talking to Luke and

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