We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Perhaps the fire had destroyed everything and we would go back tomorrow and find that the past six years had been burned and they were waiting for us, sitting around the dining-room table waiting for Constance to bring them their dinner.

I 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.

for one quick minute the great shadowy room came back together again, as it should be, and then fell apart forever.

I wondered why we would feel different if we saw who sent Uncle

Julian flowers. Certainly Uncle Julian buried in flowers, swarmed over by flowers, would not resemble the Uncle Julian we had seen every day. Perhaps masses of flowers would warm Uncle Julian dead; I tried to think of Uncle Julian dead and could only remember him asleep. I thought of the Clarkes and the Carringtons and the Wrights pouring armfuls of flowers down onto poor old Uncle Julian, helplessly

door, “one of these days you’re going to need help. You’ll be sick, or hurt. You’ll need help. Then

“Some days I shall be a summer breakfast on the lawn, and some days I shall be a formal dinner by

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

Merricat addresses the reader as an

Merricat is socially maladroit, highly self-conscious and

disdainful of others.

(Merricat is too willful a witch to align herself with a putative higher power, especially a masculine power.)

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—that

much of her time is spent outdoors, alone with her companion cat Jonas; she’s a tomboy who wanders in the woods, unwashed and her hair uncombed; she’s distrustful of adults, and of authority; despite being uneducated, she is shrewdly intelligent, and

If Merricat is mad, it’s a “poetic” madness

Much Madness is divinest Sense—/ To a discerning Eye—/ Much sense—the starkest Madness—‘Tis

It may have been her parents’ disciplining of her that precipitated the family tragedy

Merricat’s fantasies are childish, alarmingly sadistic:

harrowing

famous

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within…” (The Haunting

Why no one seems to suspect—as the reader does, immediately—that the unstable Merricat, not the amiable Constance, is the poisoner is one of the curiosities of the

Certainly there’s little subterfuge in Merricat’s teasing of others, in alluding to various kinds of poisons;

Sexual attraction per se is virtually nonexistent in Jackson’s

Shirley Jackson died at the age of forty-nine, shortly after the publication of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, of amphetamine addiction, alcoholism and morbid obesity; negligent of her health for years, she is said to have spoken openly of not expecting to live to be fifty, and in the final months of her life suffered from agoraphobia so extreme she couldn’t leave her squalid bedroom—as if in mimicry of the agoraphobic sisters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)

the slightest wish on Constance’s part for something other than her stultifying robot-life and Merricat reacts

The sisters are linked forever by the deaths of their family, as in a quasi-spiritual-incestuous

Food shopping (by Merricat), food preparation (by Constance), and food consumption (by both) is the sacred, or erotic ritual that binds

Jackson’s novel of multiple personalities, The Bird’s Nest, the afflicted young heroine’s psychiatrist—aptly named Dr Wright—tries

Now we understand why Constance never accused Merricat of the poisonings or made any attempt to defend herself against accusations that she was the murderer for, in her heart, she was and is the Blackwoods’ murderer, and not Merricat; that is, not

an astonishing wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the agoraphobic is not pitied but revered, idolized; the destruction of her house isn’t death to her, but a new life