Bonus Book! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Horror (1962 - 186 pp.)

Of Shirley Jackson's work, I was previously only familiar with "The Lottery", which I read - and loved - years ago, as well as the fantastic Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. According to Jackson's biographer Judy Oppenheimer, when Jackson's physical and mental health deteriorated, her protagonists' own health went with it, in an extreme version of Real Life Writes the Plot. As We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson's last, and purportedly best, work, it stands to reason that protagonist Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood is completely psychotic. Jackson does not disappoint.

The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat, lives with her 28-year-old sister Constance, their elderly uncle Julian, and, for a brief period during the book's second half, their 32-year-old cousin Charles. They inhabit the family home, located on a sprawling estate somewhere in New England, where Constance and Julian never leave. It falls to Merricat, and later Charles, to go shopping in the nearby village for books and groceries. Merricat is shunned by the villagers. The reader quickly finds out why; six years prior to the book, most of the Blackwood family died by arsenic poisoning, leaving only Merricat (who was not at dinner), Constance (who did not eat any poison) and Julian (who ate a small portion of poison, leaving him permanently disabled). Constance was charged with the murders but acquitted, although that helps her little in the local court of public opinion. The home dynamic resembles the classic 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, making 1962 a year marked by uncomfortable home drama creepiness.*

I saw the reveal (143) coming from essentially the start of the book, yet I was still impressed with Jackson's foreshadowing. Without spoiling any plot point, Merricat's frequent info dumping of her likes and dislikes, her predilections, and her deep-seated but unexplained hatreds come through numerous times. 

Where my perception of the book differs more from the traditional critical take is that I consider Charles to be a genuine good guy. He is preoccupied with the family fortune, but given how much longer Merricat and Constance have to live, the sisters should be thinking about money more. By contrast, in one scene, Merricat buries a substantial sum under the lawn, which Constance laughs off as an expression of Merricat's love of burying things. (115-116) Charles is frequently furious at the other characters, and rightly so; Merricat attempts to ward him off using magic, Julian calls Charles "John" after the deceased family patriarch, and Constance considers all of this and more to be perfectly tolerable. Meanwhile, Charles is so perplexed by Merricat's hostility toward him that he asks Jonas, "How can I make Cousin Mary like me?" (90) When Charles finally gives up on restoring the family relationship and finances, there is nothing left for Jackson to write. The Charles/Constance break is more of a game over for the Blackwood family than the original deaths or the housefire.

A subject that gripped me throughout the book is just how small the house's inhabitants' worlds are. For a book released contemporaneously with the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no mention of the Cold War, no hint that any of the older characters could have been World War II veterans, and no mention of any place outside the small, unnamed New England village where Merricat shops. At the very start of the book, when Merricat passes the general store, she notes that "[i]n this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home." (13) It borders on preposterous that any character within Merricat's reclusive perception would ever think outside the boundaries of the village, which may as well be on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.** This geographic isolation presents the Blackwoods' situation as retrograde, so We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be believable as a period piece set as early as the American Civil War. More currently, it calls to mind pandemic-related isolation, as well as life in a hotel. Would Zoom have helped the Blackwoods, or would it have simply been another medium for shunning them?

I was stunned to learn that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was never released as a feature movie until 2018. With its film-friendly horror genre and deranged narrator, clocking in at a svelte 48,140 words, it seems like a logical choice for the big screen. On top of that, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would have virtually zero special effects. Of course, the movie is not available in Canada on any of the streaming services I have, so the question is moot anyway. Merricat's narration*** is scary enough.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 2

*1962 is also the release year of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. By pure coincidence, 1962 was apparently a good year to release a novel ending in the word "Castle".

**Ironically, it is easier to imagine various science fiction characters who roam the galaxy jumping from solar system to solar system than to imagine Merricat, Constance or Julian walking two villages over.

***For a 1962-written comparison (what a year!), Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest intersects unreliable first-person narration with palpable mental illness. Books are arguably the best media at entering a narrator's head, especially with narrators like Merricat, who never even tell the reader what they look like, and tend to smash mirrors anyhow.