Prisons of the mind, prisons of domesticity: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Shirley Jackson
6 min. Literary fiction, gothic
That the “castle” in We have always lived in the castle is a prison shouldn’t surprise the female gothic reader—they know that the horror, for women, lies in the domestic sphere. The titular “castle” is not even an actual castle, but instead a two-story house standing alone on the Blackwood plot of land, enclosed by a fence with ‘no trespassing’ signs, trees, and bushes. What makes it castle-like is the protagonist’s imagination on one hand, and the divide between the Blackwoods (Mary Katherine, Constance, and their old uncle Julian) and the people of the village—“‘The highway’s built for common people,’ our mother said, ‘and my front door is private’” (18). The preoccupation with private property, especially accumulating in one family, is clear from the very first page of the novel. “We always had a solid foundation of stable possessions,” the narrator says, “we always put things back where they belonged.” And again: “Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world” (1). The Blackwoods, and our narrator Mary Katherine among them, are conservatives; while are outcasts, hated in the village, and hating the village back, they uphold the established social order very carefully. No real familiarity exists between them and the people: when she steps into a shop, Mary Katherine is always served immediately, no matter who else is there; when women come for tea at their house, they feel more like peasants visiting their feudatory than guests.
Shirley Jackson’s first-person narrative draws the reader into the web of Mary Katherine’s complex, sometimes shocking thoughts. In the first chapter, when she is in the village to do some grocery shopping, she suddenly wishes the hostile villagers dead, delighting in imagining herself stepping over the contorted corpses of the people standing around her in the shop. “I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true,” she admits (9). She is often in a world half real and half imagined, devising protective spells with magic words to ward off the external world and its changes, burying objects and nailing them to the trees around the property to protect their land and their house. When all else seems to fail, Mary Katherine imagines a house on the moon, for herself and her sister Constance, furnishing it in her head piece by piece, adding here a fireplace and there a garden, painting it blue. All is clearly not well in this Blackwood family and their castle-home, despite the fact that “Merricat” insists in painting their life as happy in their isolation, Constance growing food in their garden and cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner for everyone. We know from the start: everyone else in the family is dead. Merricat seems not to be affected; she likes things just as they are. She likes her sister’s angel-of-the-hearth character, she craves isolation, she absolutely needs her rules. Change, in any form, is terrifying; whenever Constance mentions any sort of change, even in the distant future, Merricat ignores the statement, stating to the reader: I was chilled. There is something profoundly sinister here, something that emerges from the prose and the narrator’s increasingly worrying statements; we get a clearer and clearer idea of how exactly the traumatic incident in the family’s recent past unfolded with every page.
There is a princess trapped in this castle: it’s Constance, Merricat’s twenty-eight years old sister. When we meet Constance for the first time, she is “standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight:” the house comes first. A more natural formulation might have been “standing in the sunlight, with the house behind her;” but Shirley Jackson uses every word to her advantage. Constance stands outside the house; it’s too far, Merricat comments, “chilled” at the thought of Constance walking away from the house and into the village. If Constance is agoraphobic, and she might very well be, wouldn’t a good sister be happy for her if she seems ready to overcome her fears, step by step? But Merricat is terrified of all kinds of change; and with her fears and with her temper and her rules, she traps her sister in the house like a princess in a tower. That Constance is a princess in the narrator’s eyes is established immediately after this interaction:
When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess. I used to try to draw her picture, with long golden hair and eyes as blue as the crayon could make them, and a bright pink spot on either cheek; the pictures always surprised me, because she did look like that; even at the worst time she was pink and white and golden, and nothing had ever seemed to dim the brightness of her. She was the most precious person in my world, always. (19-20)
Merricat refuses to see her sister as a grown-up, refuses to see her as more than her caretaker and the childish drawing of her with crayon-pink cheeks. When somebody comes from the outside that might take her away, calling her “Connie” and talking to her like an adult, Merricat immediately casts him in her story as a ghost and a demon. But it is she who is a witch, with a witch’s familiar, her black cat Jonas; she who casts spells to protect herself, she who wishes she could be a werewolf. A violent creature, suiting her violent nature. When Constance seems to consider going outside, Mary Katherine has a violent outburst, smashes their best milk pitcher on the floor, and then says, “I left the pieces on the floor so Constance would see them” (27). Constance is immediately punished for trying to deviate from the Blackwood-norm; violence is not done on her, but on her things—which still constitutes an act of domestic abuse.
Stop reading here if you are not familiar with the ending of the novel!
In the end, as we foresee from the title, Constance and Merricat always live in the castle, with villagers bringing them food on occasion, again like peasants to a feudal lord. Mary Katherine has fulfilled her fantasies of destruction, and she is forever separate from the rest of the world, holding Constance in her castle-prison with her. And she is happy; worst of all, she pretends her sister is happy too, while robbing her of freedom and a normal life. Is her delusion finally complete, or is there a degree of make-believe?