Mansion on the Hill

“Mansion on the Hill” The third song on the first side of the album is a reworking of a Hank Williams 1947 song of the same name (Garman 88). It is a set of three images: one general overview, an introduction to the setting addressed to “sir,” to whom the narrator gives the description, two memories from childhood of the mansion, and a conclusion set in the narrative present. The mansion, set above the “factories and the fields” is surrounded by “gates of hardened steel” while children still play along the road outside. The children in both memories and in the narrative present propose the generational continuity that make this song a description of a sociohistorical process in addition to a personal memoir. The two memories from childhood are set apart by gender and by generation. The first tells of trips taken by the narrator and his father through a “silent and still” town to watch the mansion at night, from a “back road on the highway side”; the feel of this memory is of frustration and anger, set in the cars, roads, and towns of industrialization. The second memory is with the narrator’s sister, as they peer up at the mansion, secretly watching the lights, laughter, and music from a cornfield down below. This memory seems kinder, with a more natural, childlike wonder and camaraderie. The final summary sets the mansion in socioeconomic terms; as the narrator watches “cars rushing home from the mill” a full moon rises over the mansion, accentuating the sense of the recurring, endless cycle of childhood into adulthood, into a system separated by both geography and class.

In contrast to Hank Williams’s romantic allegory of class separation, where the narrator is in his “cabin” in the valley and his lover is “alone with her pride” in her “loveless mansion,” Springsteen’s allegory is more complex and more alienated. Garman and Guterson both note that the song emerged out of his growing sense of social consciousness especially, notes Guterson, after his appearance on August 20, 1981 at a benefit for the Vietnam Veterans of America, which Guterson claims “changed Springsteen and his music”, noting that Springsteen immediately started performing more covers in his concerts, including Woody Guthrie tunes such as “This Land is Your Land” (Guterrman 130). It appears as if Springsteen, influenced by the working-class music of Williams, was inspired by Guthrie’s social consciousness and contemporary events to create a complex web of intergenerational, genderized, and sociohistorically relevant experiences and observations in this retelling of class alienation.

The song’s placement, after “Nebraska” and “Atlantic City”, lends itself to the oft-interpreted (Garman 88-90, Marsh 366-68) class-struggle reading; after two songs that deal with realistic events told in a dramatic monologue from an adult’s perspective, monologues that describe specific nihilistic occasions, the third song gives the listener a look at the childhood roots of this hopelessness, in a kind of narrative overview, a dramatic monologue that functions as an Introduction to the social milieu of the lost American Dream. Marsh claims the song is set in an actual place near Freehold, and notes the interplay of professional, political, and personal crisis at work in the song (371).