If I had to pick a favorite work of Gothic writing, it would be Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her use of an unreliable narrator, a constant stream of subtext and an immersive setting make this novella one that I could read over and over, never tiring of its complexity and beauty.
So what’s the story about? (Beware! Plot Spoilers Ahead)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson is a story about a young woman, Mary Katherine “Merricat” who lives a very isolated life with her agoraphobic sister Constance and her dying Uncle Julian. (And of course, Jonas, her cat.) Six years prior, the rest of the family died of arsenic poisoning. Everyone suspected Connie, who had prepared dinner that day, of having murdered them, but the court found her innocent.
Regardless, the villagers still suspect the two girls of murder and use this as rationale for hating and mistreating the two. Merricat, in return, despises all of them. The three live a whimsically odd life until their cousin Charles arrives and threatens to take over the household, control Constance and banish Merricat.
Merricat, who, despite her seeming disassociation from reality, is actually very wise to his schemes, determines to undermine every external threat, including that of Charles.
Merricat: Part Devil, Part Elf
We see a glimpse of our protagonist, Merricat, and her role as an unreliable narrator in the book’s opening statement:
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.
Nothing Merricat says, regardless of how it seems, is ever random. Here Jackson is telling us a great deal about this character. First, she has a great deal of anger. Her desire to have been born a werewolf – a creature that hunts and kills others with a great degree of invincibility – isn’t strictly an issue of the length of her fingers.
Second, Jackson portrays Merricat as borderline autistic. An eighteen-year-old who hates washing herself and noise is generally on the spectrum, albeit very high-functioning in Merricat’s case. Jackson gives us more evidence of this throughout the book. Merricat rarely makes eye contact with anyone, although she’s able to. She doesn’t like anyone touching her except her sister, and only when she initiates. And she is driven by routine and self-imposed rules and does not like deviating from these.
Third, Merricat lists her fondness for Richard Plantagenet, a man Shakespeare portrayed as having killed several of his family members and a poisonous mushroom (the amanita phalloides death cap mushroom). In these Jackson is both foreshadowing Merricat’s role in her family’s deaths and alluding to Merricat’s sociopathic tendencies. Of course, she is the one who killed the family and has absolutely no remorse for having done so. And she hates everyone other than Connie and maybe her Uncle Julian.
Despite all that, Jackson makes us love her.
Merricat’s voice is hilarious, her perspective is consistently and delightfully off, and she has a fanciful, childlike sense of wonder. She’s obsessed with sympathetic magic – burying items and smashing mirrors in order to try to control the world around her.
In summary, she’s one of the most unique and fascinating characters I’ve ever read. And she’s my favorite protagonist ever. Hands down.
The Opposing Forces
But in the book, there are two principle forces that act against Merricat and Constance: the village (greater and lesser) and their cousin Charles.
Readers are introduced to the greater village – the residents of their New England town – in the very beginning of the story when Merricat goes into the village for groceries and books. Some people are openly mocking, like Jim Donell and the children who taunt her with rhymes about her sister poisoning people. Others are standoffish and quietly hostile, like the grocers and their other customers. Jackson presents a village full of people who have always hated the Blackwood family and who now have a reason – the suspected murder – for openly persecuting Merricat.
Other families – the more affluent ones, like the Clarkes – are sympathetic towards Constance and Mary Katherine. But Jackson presents them as antagonists as well in that they try to persuade the two girls to rejoin society. Merricat, who wants nothing more than to live forever cloistered away in her privacy with only her cat and her sister, views these attempts as a hostile invasion of her fortress.
The second antagonist is their cousin Charles. He comes to visit around the one-third point in the book, and everything goes wrong from that point on. Charles is a greedy man who wants to take their money, take over their home and all of the family’s possessions, and take Constance away from Merricat. He also wants to get rid of Merricat. Whereas Connie is submissive and malleable to his domineering influence, Merricat is not. She is wild, uncontrollable, and likely to thwart everything he does. And he knows it.
Charles makes his intentions clear through several comments. For example, he says to Merricat, “…come a month from now, I wonder who will still be here [living in the house]? You…or me?” Another time he tells her, indirectly, that he knows how to get even with people.
What’s particularly interesting is that Jackson also uses Charles to represents the girls’ dead family, especially their parents. In that respect, Charles is both an antagonist in and of himself, and a representation of the lesser village – the family – as a [former] antagonistic force in the girls’ lives. We’ll get into the lesser village in detail when we discuss the Gothic tropes of repressed memories and ghosts/demons below.
First though, what is Jackson trying to say throughout this story?
The Theme
This story, like others Jackson wrote, features what some have called a “village vs. the individual” theme. It’s a story about the evil of groups of people and their tendency to shun and even persecute those who are not part of their group. This stems from Jackson’s experiences as an outsider living in a small town in New England. She saw this mentality first-hand. Those who were the established families in the town were part of the group. Those who moved into the area, as she did with her husband, were disliked and excluded from the group, the village.
Jackson takes this a step further and presents what we sometimes refer to as mob mentality – the tendency that groups sometimes have to act in ways that the individuals in that group never would on their own. So whereas fifty individuals wouldn’t dream of burning down someone’s house, the collective whole sometimes will. The village becomes something other – and in Jackson’s opinion, vastly more evil – than the individuals themselves.
We see this through Merricat as she senses danger around other people and safety only when she’s alone or with one or two of her preferred family members. The idea is that the village is unsafe and inhospitable. That the individual must separate herself from and, when necessary, act against the village in order to survive.
This is a particularly Gothic theme – an irrational one that’s focused on a psychological and even sociological situation that we can’t explain or even understand. And yet it’s a phenomenon that we can point to and often do witness in human history.
Gothic Tropes
Jackson uses several Gothic tropes to support this theme, and yet she does so in a uniquely subtle way that only she could manage so effectively. We’ll talk about four of them: Isolation, Psychological Instability (Merricat), Repressed Memories (Uncle Julian), and Ghosts/ Demons (Personified in Charles).
Isolation: Clearly isolation ties into the theme – with its idea that the individual must separate herself from the village in order to be safe – the most easily. Both Merricat and Constance self-isolate, Merricat out of disdain for the village and Constance out of fear. But their isolation is often threatened. Well-meaning neighbors and their cousin Charles attempt to, and nearly do, persuade Connie to leave the house and rejoin society. What Merricat sees that Connie doesn’t, is that to do so would open themselves up to danger. She understands that the villagers and Charles cannot be trusted.
Jackson juxtaposes the character of the two girls as if they are two opposing types of individuals. Constance is the submissive, gentle, selfless, serving sister. She’s always cleaning, cooking, and caring for someone else. And she’s the one who is the most vulnerable to attack. She’s the one who is almost taken in by Charles’s schemes. Constance is the example of an individual who doesn’t fight against the village and is nearly destroyed by it.
In contrast, Merricat is the wild, vindictive, remorseless sister. She’s the one who sees people most truly, calls things like they are, and is the most capable at defending their fortress. Though her final actions in the story seem destructive on the surface, it’s actually Merricat who seals up their castle and eliminates all external threats from their lives. It’s Merricat who secures the perpetual service of the villagers. She is the example of the individual who fights against the village and prevails.
Psychological Instability: Merricat is unstable. She’s an unreliable narrator, and Jackson uses her brilliantly. This is the kind of story you can read over and over again and still delight in the nuance or even catch something new. Every word in the book means something. So if you see Merricat saying something that seems random, or nonsensical, I would recommend that you stop and question it. For example, consider the following brief conversation between Merricat and Constance:
“…Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.”
“Some rose petals are poisonous.”
“Not on the moon. Is it true that you can plant a leaf?”
“Some leaves. Furred leaves. You can put them in water and they grow roots and then you plant them and they grow into a plant. The kind of plant they were when they started, of course, not just any plant.”
“I’m sorry about that…I like a leaf that grows into a different plant…”
It would be really easy to grace over this section, chalk it up to nothing more than Merricat’s very fanciful imagination, and move on. With a lesser writer, that might be just as well. With Jackson, we would be missing something.
So what is she telling us here?
Well, for one, we see foreshadowing. Here Merricat alludes to something that might be poisonous to eat – rose petals – but that where she wants to take Constance, they will be safe to eat. So Merricat is subtly saying that she very carefully poisoned the family in such a way that ensured Constance would be safe. This comes to light later, but here it is foreshadowed.
For another, in her comments about planting leaves, Merricat (and Jackson) tells us something about people. When a leaf is cut off from its plant, it can sometimes grow into another plant. But Constance says it’ll be the same kind of plant it was originally. Merricat is sad about that.
What she’s saying here is that you can cut someone off from their plant (their group) and they can still grow and thrive, but they’ll never be any different. They’ll still be like the group they were once a part of. The idea is that those who belong to the village – even if they’re removed from it – will at some point re-form a new village like the prior one. And that village will always oppose the individual.
This is just one example among many in which Jackson uses Merricat’s very unstable and strange psychological state to slip in a constant stream of subtext that gives meaning to the book. And, more to our point here, she uses Merricat as an example of someone who seems most culpable of evil, to point to those who, though they appear to be socially acceptable, are in fact more evil than she is.
Repressed Memories: Uncle Julian is an interesting character study. Jackson uses his shaky mental state – a result of having consumed a small amount of the arsenic – to point to the truth of the Blackwood family and to give Merricat a motive.
Uncle Julian spends the entire novella compiling his notes on what happened six years ago, the day the rest of the family died. He pores over minute details like what each person wore, where they sat at the table, what they had said or done earlier in the day, and yet, even though he was there and withnessed it all, he can’t discover what has happened.
Why?
Jackson tells us on page 93. Uncle Julian states that Mary Katherine died during the trial after that fateful day. It’s only in retrospect that we realize that he has never spoken to Merricat, or looked at her, throughout the entire story. This is crucial to the theme. Julian’s mind is not sound, but he’s present enough to communicate on a seemingly rational level. He must have known that she poisoned the family. However, Julian has repressed this memory by convincing himself that she died and that “she did not survive the loss of her family.”
Was Merricat bereaved after their deaths? No, of course not. She’s anything but.
By using Julian’s repressed memories, Jackson makes a subtle connection with the readers. Essentially, Julian shows us that though Merricat is guilty, her actions were justified. Some part of Julian knows what she did and yet, no matter how he examines the evidence, he can’t find her guilty. Why?
We find the answer if we examine all of Julian’s comments. There we see a picture of the Blackwood family.
Julian says that his brother John, Merricat’s father, never begrudged them their food as long as they ate very sparingly. And Uncle Julian, who confuses Charles with his dead brother, John, tells us that Charles, like John, is greedy, consumed with money and material goods, and dishonest. This is how Jackson gives readers a glimpse into Merricat’s motive for murdering them. The entire family was cold and cruel to her, to Uncle Julian and most likely also to Constance. In return, Merricat poisoned them.
Uncle Julian, who knows how terrible his brother was, and how cruel the family could be, understands why Merricat did so. He understands the theme even though he refuses to admit it.
Ghosts/Demons: The ghost in this story is Charles. Merricat says that he looks like her father, that he’s a ghost, a demon. Even Uncle Julian – who confuses Charles with his brother – begins calling him “John.”
Through Charles as the demon or ghost of the family, Jackson gives us a first-hand view of the lesser village – the Blackwood family – and how it acted against Merricat. When Charles comes, it’s as if the family is resurrected from the dead. Through him, the manipulative and selfish abusiveness of their family returns to the house. If Charles had been left to his devices, he would have ensnared Constance, taken all of their material possessions and thrown Merricat and Uncle Julian out of the house.
But, Merricat won’t tolerate it. Her actions escalate as she attempts to exorcise him from her house and her life. Through Charles, we see why the village is a threat to the individual and why the individual must both separate herself from and act against it.
Is The Book Gothic?
I’d definitely call this book Gothic. Jackson’s theme is a psychological one that can’t be reasoned. We know that the tendencies groups have towards exclusion or even a mob mentality is true. And yet, it can’t be studied empirically, or proven in any way. That makes it a Gothic theme.
And Jackson uses her tropes very effectively to exemplify this theme. She does this better than almost any writer. What’s so interesting about Jackson is that her tropes tend to be very subtle. She doesn’t use vampires or stormy weather or some of the more overt gothic tropes. Rather, she uses Gothic tropes more symbolically – like the ghost of the family, represented by Charles – and with a light hand.
Lastly, Jackson brings a distinctly unsettling mood to her books through characters and/or environments that are off just enough as to be disorienting to the reader. We’ll talk about The Haunting of Hill House at some point, because that’s another deep dive into a character’s psychological underpinnings. In that case, she uses the environment – the house – to create this impression. But this unsettling mood has the effect of leaving the reader off balance just enough to be impressionable and open to the theme.
We could go on for hours about this little novella and look at things like why Constance repeatedly says that everything that Merricat does is her fault, but I’ll leave that for you to think about as you read or re-read the book. Let me know what you think about this and anything else we’ve discussed in the comments below!
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