The Malleability of a Child's imagination

In "The Haunting of Hill House", Eleanor was seen as rather childish in that she has not been given the opportunity to mature like everyone else the way she had to tend to her mother all those years. In "The Sandman", Nathanael was traumatized as a child when Coppelius grabbed him one night and was just about ready to take his eyes out. I see an association with the eyes of children and the madness that comes over them. It plays into the theme of the child being easily malleable in thought, meaning that they are at an age so pure that they will believe anything.

Eleanor began her "new life" by leaving the home of her sister to stay a few days in Hill House. She wanted to belong somewhere, especially in a place that she could call her own (she repeatedly claimed partial ownership of the car in the beginning of the story). Because everything around her now was new, she wanted everything new to belong to her, giving her this false sense of identity that was attached to miscellaneous items. With that eagerness of possession, she easily falls into the distortions of Hill House, believing nothing is wrong with it and that it was something beautiful, like how she wanted to feel about herself. Thus, she creates a new view in which she is the center of importance and that she finally has control of her life. This impedes her ability to see things rationally and her final thoughts were still so loose that she ends up accelerating her car into a tree. She got so wrapped up in her imagination that it took her life.

The same happened to Nathanael when he initially accepted the idea that there was a Sandman and fed his curiosity by staking out in his father's room to catch a glimpse. Upon seeing that the Sandman was someone who he actually knows, he is traumatized to the fact that a man who is alike in Coppelius' appearance brings back all the nightmarish memories and conceptions of the Sandman form his youth. As if trying to suppress his fears, he seeks solace in Olympia's company in which he is profoundly ignorant of all warning signs that she is not what she appears to be. Nathanael's openness to accepting the existence of the Sandman and the perfection of Olympia is the cause of his demise of falling off the tower to his death.