“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
Disturbing, strange, and wonderfully off-kilter, We Have Always Lived in the Castle gives us a dark, child’s world. As with most of Shirley Jackson’s works, certainly all of her best work, it presents a weird psychological landscape of menace and survival of the oddest kind.
Considered by many, including myself, to be her finest work, from the start it provides mystery and suspense, along with a weird atmosphere and growing threat. It carries and increases this feeling throughout. The novel also introduces us to as unique a main character as I can recall: the book’s unreliable narrator.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
The Wickedness of Innocence
We Have Always Lived in the Castle has something in common with The Haunting of Hill House, the novel Shirley Jackson is best known for. I call it the wickedness of innocence, though it’s stronger in The Castle than in The Haunting. (It’s also found in her novel The Bird’s Nest, particularly in that book’s character, Betsy.)
By this phrase I mean there is a child’s understanding of good and evil. Some things are right or wrong because they are said to be. There isn’t a sense for why they are, particularly those things that are wrong. There’s no sense for the reality of consequences; no visceral understanding for what an action might mean.
Eleanor in the The Haunting, and Merricat (Mary Katherine) in The Castle, share this childlike quality; an imaginative disconnect from reality. It’s partly the result of a lack of emotional development, which has been stunted due to the circumstances of childhood—their family and social life, or lack thereof. It’s also a defensive device against those circumstances.
It comes across most strongly with Merricat. We encounter it in the voice of the main character, something Shirley Jackson excels at. She often employs the tone, and sometimes even the rhythms, of nursery rhymes to communicate the sinister qualities inherent in innocence. Thus, like a child Merricat often wishes people would die but she doesn’t fully comprehend what it would mean, nor does she care.
The Blackwoods
The first chapter of We Have Always Lived in the Castle sets the stage as it places a dull, economically depressed village against the wealthier families who live outside it; setting the snooty Blackwoods against mean-spirited, resentful villagers; and putting the fantasy life of a privileged eighteen year-old girl in opposition to the banal realities of those who must work.
Merricat’s fantastic world is so powerful it overflows into, and even overwhelms the real one.
She is one of three surviving members of the Blackwoods. They are one of the wealthy families that live outside the village. They’re resented. And why wouldn’t they be? They look down their noses on everyone else. They’ve cut themselves off. The father, who owns a great deal of the land, has the home and property fenced with gates and padlocks. (It’s interesting to note that he does this at his wife’s prompting. In Shirley Jackson’s world, men are stupid and pompous; women are spiteful and vain.)
One day, everyone in the Blackwood family dies of arsenic poisoning with the exceptions of Merricat, her sister Constance, and Uncle Julian—he survives the poisoning but is confined to a wheelchair.
That is the story’s background, as is the trial Constance had to face when accused of the crime. (She was acquitted though everyone in the village thinks she did it.)
Merricat and Constance
Where the story begins, Constance is at home with Merricat and Uncle Julian (whom she cares for). She is extremely fragile. She hasn’t left the house for six years except for going into the garden. Constance has little or no contact with the outside world. Uncle Julian is limited as well, not so much because he chooses to be as due to his disability.
We’re given hints that Merricat likes it this way. Though she needs Constance, she likes that Constance also needs her.
Merricat lives in a world of imagination and looks to her sister for direction, though it is Merricat who goes out past the garden to the borders of the property and into the world (to get groceries twice weekly). Jackson gives us a picture of two sisters who work together as one, protecting one another; each compensating for and protective of the other. They are whole; a reconstituted family.
But it is an extremely delicate construct and it’s only maintained with the greatest of care. It’s one that depends on pretense and denial, and on Constance not becoming too independent.
Then it is threatened. Cousin Charles comes to visit.
His character is very much like that of the villagers—greedy, and not so much stupid as blandly unaware. He is the story’s catalyst. Things begin to unravel.
The Banality of Daily Life
Jackson is known as a writer of terror, horror, suspense—all those words that are synonyms for fear—and to a degree that is accurate. But it is not so much fear that Jackson is supreme at as it is anxiety.
She creates wonderfully unsettling worlds by starting with the banality of daily life and with characters who are essentially dull. She then burrows down into their secret lives and dredges to the surface what is hidden and puts it on display. It’s often done through a character’s voice, as with Merricat:
I would have liked to come into the grocery store some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.
The voice is that of a child, or sociopath, or someone with delayed cognitive development. It is a simple voice, the wickedness of innocence I referred to. It comes across powerfully in We Have Always Lived in the Castle because the novel is told in Merricat’s voice.
As the story progresses, the truth is revealed. It’s what we suspected early on, and have confirmed later, but the real secret of the story, what it is actually about, we don’t uncover until the end.
The heroes of Jackson’s stories are always flawed, but always in Jackson’s own unique way: dull, internalized, outsiders, socially awkward, and female.
And always, there is Jackson’s humour: mischievous, satirical, and very funny, very nicely balanced with the darkness that informs the stories, as in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (I love the character of Uncle Julian, who is tremendously funny. Humour, often satirical, is another large aspect of Jackson’s writing.)
In this novel, Shirley Jackson has all her storytelling tools in perfect balance. And it is one hell of a good story.
December 17, 2017