We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962, was the last novel published by acclaimed writer Shirley Jackson. It was adapted into a play and a Broadway musical. 

Allison:          

Recently someone began talking to me about a book as if I had read it, because of course I had read it. Everyone’s read it, and especially a bookseller should have read it.

I hadn’t read it.

I wasn’t embarrassed. This happens to me a lot. I talk to people about books for a living, and so many books come out every year, I must be nothing but picky! Yet, this interaction reminded me that there are marked holes in my cannon. Holes I’ve been meaning to fill. Shirley Jackson was a hole. The Grandmamma of the Horror genre. Infamous for a short story called "The Lottery," that even if I didn’t read in high school, I’ve read enough academic thought about it, seen enough Twilight Zone episodes mimicking it, to get the jist. Shirley Jackson isn’t just a horror writer. She inspired the likes of Stephen King, but (as far as I know) she never had to fight the Stephen King battle between commercialism and legitimacy (so it be known, when I say “just a horror writer,” I mean it sarcastically. Any day of the week, I will argue that 100 years from now Stephen King will be one of the most important figures in American literature, despite what crank-pot Harold Bloom has to say...but I digress). There are lots of anomalies about Shirley Jackson. She is a woman who reigns supreme of a genre (horror) otherwise populated by men. Outside of her novels, she’s a housewife, editorially unattractive (every article I read about her makes a statement about her weight, but who says the same about George R. R. Martin?) and early death aside, fairly unscandalous. Shirley Jackson is considered high literature, while still wearing the crown of horror, because her work is thick with social commentary—teachable moments, if you will. And they are easy to find.

TIME magazine called We Have Always Lived in the Castle one of the best 10 books of 1962. I picked it for bookclub because I didn’t think it had any ghosts in it. I was right, no ghosts. What it does have is perhaps the most unreliable narrator I’ve ever encountered, in Mary Katherine, called Merricat, Blackwood. Spoiler alert, I am about to ruin everything if you’ve any interest in reading the book. Merricat is a sociopath, the scariest type, the one that successfully kills on a whim—poisons her entire family, excepting her beloved sister Constance and the accidentally spared, yet crippled, Uncle Julian. This isn’t explicitly said until the final chapters of the book, but I easily sussed it by chapter three. Merricat, who is in charge of the delivery of information as our first-person narrator, is obviously deranged. Her interior monologues reveal a development stuck in pre-adolescence, despite the fact that we know she’s eighteen years old. Merricat is incapable of considering the perspective of those around her. All of her interactions are based on a risk/benefit to her and her alone, demonstrating a lack of progression from egocentricity to empathetic response—a stage of childhood development that begins at about seven years old. There’s also something feral about her and her interactions with nature, which are expertly mirrored through her attention to the behavior of her cat and constant companion, Jonas.

We don’t really know why Merricat killed her family—her mother, her father, her brother, and aunt (Uncle Julian’s wife). All details about the murder and how it was accomplished are provided by Julian, who, like Merricat, is stuck in time. Julian is obsessed with the incident and spends his days recounting and recollecting any and all details he can muster about the night the family sat down for a dinner served by Constance, and ate berries sprinkled with poisoned sugar. Constance doesn’t take sugar with her berries, which made her the prime suspect. Merricat was absent, having been sent to her room without supper. Julian, although he has lived with her for six years post-murders, believes Merricat to also be dead, having succumbed to neglect in an orphanage during Constance’s long trial (although curiously, he professes Constance’s innocence, yet never then speculates on who did it). Julian doesn’t see Merricat at all, and deals only with Constance. Constance, frozen as well, has not once left the house since her release. Obviously she knows of Merricat’s guilt, yet has never revealed the truth, and has dutifully cared for her murderous sister and ailing Uncle year after year.

Most of the story’s symbolism is found in the peripheral characters, those not living in the “castle”. The town is divided into two groups: the working class townspeople and the outlying rich. All consider Constance guilty, despite her acquittal. Most brutally portrayed, is the sheepish mass of the working class, who are villainously jealous of the Blackwood’s wealth and their snobbish isolation. They begrudge the large house and the shortcut through the property that Merricat and Constance’s mother had barred their access years ago. The rich are painted less vindictive, yet petty and frankly, stupid, considering any contact with the Blackwoods to be novelty and status-building. Fame is attractive, despite the manner under which it is acquired. These tropes were designed (among other things) to create sympathy for Constance especially, but also Merricat and Uncle Julian. All of this was fairly stated and obvious, bordering didactic, therefore not that interesting to me.

My biggest problem with the book was setting the perspective with Merricat. Making your main character a legitimate psychopath is risky business because the average non-psychopathic individual cannot relate to this train of thought. For me, it was a suspension of disbelief that I couldn’t sustain. It was ultimately impossible to believe Jackson could manifest a true interior of a murderous sociopath, having never been a psychopath herself. This is my problem, I know. Also why I won't read American Psycho. We could argue all day about the writing of fiction from the perspective of an opposing gender, or a different nationality, creed, or class. There are thousands of examples that are truly successful, and countless more failures. It is the job of the fiction writer to create a world that is believable, sustained through the book and many would probably find Merricat’s perspective, while fictional, valid and fascinating. Just not me. Crazy is one thing—but psychopath is too easy. Psychopathy is often used as a device in a murder story that doesn’t need to follow any logic, it doesn’t have to abide by any base motivation. It’s like science fiction, where reality is dictated by the parameters limited only by the author’s imagination—excepting one very important thing: psychopaths exist, here and now, in this reality, so a psychopathic perspective is very much limited to a place of truth. I prefer reality-based fiction. If someone is going to attempt to write outside their lived perspective, I want them to have taken all the measures to ensure they are building a true experience. I need to trust they know the place from which they are writing from. If, for example, I had read this same book from the point-of-view of Constance, I would have found it infinitely more interesting. And Constance is not a “sane” or even particularly sympathetic person, as evidenced by the complete disregard for Uncle Julian, allowed to perish alone in the house fire. Yet, Constance’s decisions to care for Merricat—to bear the brunt of her crime, is tremendously interesting because Constance’s motivations are tied to a traceable history, a believable cause and effect (in fact, academic writings on this book suppose many parallels between Constance and Jackson herself). Merricat’s motivations are (as perceived by me) unauthenticated bull-sh*t.

I was disappointed in this book, but only on a personal taste-level. Psychopathic narration is just never going to do it for me. I give it an 8 on Dad’s scale of 1-10, where 1 is the highest.

Wes:

It has been difficult for me to sit down and write about the latest book because to me it is an unsatisfactory novel that leaves too many questions open and seems incomplete or missing something. That may indeed be the author’s intent but it causes me problems following it and generating internal interest. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is a dark novel about a young lady, Mary Katherine Blackwood, who is living with the aftermath of a dramatic poisoning of most of her family some six years prior that still affects the rest of her family which now consists of “Merricat”, her sister Constance, and her uncle, Julian, who remains seriously disabled from the poisoning incident.  

Reading through this book which is written from Merricat’s perspective, there appear to be several alternate explanations for all the strange occurrences that transpire with Merricat in the old Blackstone estate. Either Merricat is insane, or she is spoiled to an incredible degree, or perhaps she is a ghost, or, maybe she and Constance comprise a single person, possibly split personalities. There are probably other possible scenarios. It is hard to determine exactly what is going on and I even started back through it again after reading it the first time trying to determine by the narrative which is most likely. I did not finish because the book just was not very enjoyable to my tastes. I will outline some of the aspects of what I think is going on.     

            We learn about half-way through that Merricat was the culprit who put the rat poisoning into the fruit salad that contained the sugar-like arsenic that killed her mother, father, aunt, 10 year-old brother and crippled her uncle. Constance avoids sugar so she was spared and Merricat was banished to her room for some unknown reason during that deadly meal. Merricat’s desire to see everyone dead whom she meets discloses some kind of mental illness. She constantly dwells on death and morbidly discusses the poisonous mushrooms and their effects. She seems to live in a dream world seeing certain people as demons and constantly attempts to hex people with weird tokens such as burying someone’s possessions or nailing books to trees. She takes actions to remove people and might see her actions as justifiable for murdering her family. She takes action like breaking mirrors, causing fires, and employing hexes. She wants people dead and took action to make it so. I don’t know whether she would be ruled insane but her perspective about everyone around her seems certainly not normal.

            We also see about halfway through in one of the flashbacks that that her mother was incredibly indulgent refusing to punish her, ordering her brother to give his food to her and ordering the family to “bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.” She certainly seems to be almost a semi-wild kid who has had little or no restraint. She runs wild in the woods sleeping under trees at night and burying hex items all over. The over-indulgence might have colored her view of the world and justified her action to kill those who in her view got in the way for some reason and deserved to die.

            The evidence that Merricat is a ghost is thin but on one occasion Uncle Julian in conversation with Charles, the cousin who suddenly arrives with the design to whisk Constance away, reports that Merricat had been “longtime dead…she did not survive the loss of her family…my niece died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder.” The stupefied Charles replied that “She is sitting right here.” As the dialogue passed on to other things, this incident passes almost without comment. My observations of Merricat’s story are that they are very ghostlike but other people seem to see her so she seems pretty well a manifest being to them.

I got the feeling that Merricat and Constance could be split personalities and started looking for instances when they were actually talking not only to one another but both together with others. Those instances are there especially when Charles is there as well as when Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright came to visit. This shuts down that theory pretty well but the way they act and react when together seeming to like the same things makes this a possibility somehow.

My biggest issue with the book is all the questions that are unanswered. Why did the authorities suspect Constance as the killer? Why and how did the rat poison get in the fruit salad? Why did Constance cover for her -at that time -12 year old sister? How did Constance get set free? Why did the authorities let them go off and live alone with only an invalid and a 22 year old at the head of the household? What happened to Merricat at the orphanage? What ultimately happens to Merricat and her sister? Why would the authorities let them live in a partially burned down house? Why doesn’t Merricat go to school? I guess the author wanted to leave those questions open but that lessens my interest and makes me uncomfortable when the story never comes to closure. Based on this, I rate this book as a 6 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).