We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.

“What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

The people of the village have always hated us.

it was a very good day I would later make an offering of jewelry out of gratitude.

never looked at the Rochester house. I could not bear to think of our mother being born there.

their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers.

I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.

I imagine that there were plenty of rotting hearts in the village coveting our heaps of golden coins but they were cowards and they were afraid of Blackwoods.

would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying.

but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

“too bad about those poor girls.” “Nice farm out there,” they said, “nice land to farm. Man could get rich, farming the Blackwood land. If he had a million years and three heads, and didn’t care what grew, a man could get rich. Keep their land pretty well locked up, the Blackwoods do.” “Man could get rich.” “Too bad about the Blackwood girls.” “Never can tell what’ll grow on Blackwood land.”

Whenever I saw a tiny scrap of paper I was to remember to be kinder to Uncle Julian.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

I went into the hall to open the front door, which I had unlocked earlier because it was not courteous to unlock the door in a guest’s face.

“Afraid to visit here? I apologize for repeating your words, madam, but I am astonished. My niece, after all, was acquitted of murder. There could be no possible danger in visiting here now.”

older. We relied upon Constance for various small delicacies which only she could provide; I am of course not referring to arsenic.”

All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

“You bury food the way I bury treasure,” I told her sometimes, and she answered me once: “The food comes from the ground and can’t be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it.”

“Remember, now,” he said. “And I’ll see you next Saturday.” “Quack,” Uncle Julian said.

“Of course. I never had a head for music; I could remember what people looked like and what they said and what they did but I could never remember what they sang.

“My niece Mary Katherine has been a long time dead, young man. She did not survive the loss of her family; I supposed you knew that.”

“The way you did before?” she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. “Yes,” I said after a minute, “the way I did before.”

remembered the neat pile of partly broken furniture which Harler the junk dealer had set together last night. I wondered if he planned to come today with a truck and gather up everything he could, or if he had only put the pile together because he loved great piles of broken things and could not resist stacking junk wherever he found it.

“It would be safer to let the kitchen windows get dirty,” I told Constance, but she was shocked, and said, “I wouldn’t live in a house with dirty windows.”

“The least Charles could have done,” Constance said, considering seriously, “was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.”

Her most famous works—“The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House—are more famous than her name, and have sunk into cultural memory as timeless artifacts, seeming older than they are, with the resonance of myth or archetype. The same aura of folkloric familiarity attaches to less-celebrated writing: the stories “Charles” and “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts” (you’ve read one of these two tales, though you may not know it), and her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

conveys a vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like

Jackson devoted herself to burrowing deeper inside the feelings that appalled her, to exploring them from within.

When Cousin Charles arrives, transparently in search of the Blackwoods’ hidden fortune (though like everything else in the book, the money’s a purloined letter, secreted in full view),

Merricat, an exponent of sympathetic magic, attacks this risk of nature’s taking its course by confronting it with nature’s raw, prehuman elements: first by scattering soil and leaves in Charles’s bed, and then by starting a fire: better to incinerate the female stronghold than allow it to be invaded.