The Haunting of hill house is a noval about the horrors of family life . Discuss

Family is rather disappointing to the characters: Hugh Crain was a perverse patriarch and his wives kept dying and leaving their daughters motherless; Eleanor's mother was a demanding crone; Luke has no mother; Dr. Montague's wife is a shrew; and Theodora has trouble with her roommate/partner. As for home, it is perhaps a concept that the Montagues, Luke, and Theodora can more easily embrace, but Eleanor and the Crains of Hill House have decidedly different experiences. Home and family are complex; family is suffocating and a house is not a home. It is not a refuge but rather a suffocating and oppressive place where individuality is obliterated. Eleanor does not have a home in the way she wants one, and spends most of her time dreaming about the ideal space and being "cherished" by someone. Hill House is the home that eventually claims her and she it; she accepts its abusive love and its invitation to COME HOME ELEANOR. The novel's ambiguity surrounding the concepts of home and family suggest some of the problems with them in the wider 1950s society, where the ideal nuclear family and comfortable suburban home more often than naught contained something repressed, stultified, or distressed.