Review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book came up in discussion when a friend was asking whether to bother reading Haunting of Hill House (the answer: Do! It's considered a classic for good reason!). Having never read Jackson's tale of Merricat and Constance, I decided to read both, back to back, to compare. The short verdict: both are excellent works, well worthy of a pick up, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle creeps ahead of HoHH in my mind.

Jackson's story is memorable, to say the least. Six years ago, the Blackwood family was poisoned with arsenic at dinner. Everyone except the sisters, Merricat and Constance, ate the poison (later determined to have come from the sugar dish), and fell ill. Of those, only Uncle Julian survived. Now the sisters take care of their uncle, who is confined to a wheelchair and suffering some form of dementia, while they try to keep up their structured home life. Constance is agoraphobic, so Merricat does the twice weekly trip to town for shopping. Their lives are full of structures and routines that have taken on a ritualistic, almost magical, significance to Merricat. When an unexpected, uninvited guest arrives from the outside, it threatens to shatter the world the three Blackwoods have built for themselves.

Merricat is the true focus of this story, and not merely because she's the narrator. Her desires and actions drive the central plot. She's the most compelling of the characters, as well. Jackson gives Merricat a strong voice and personality. At 18, she still seems trapped, Peter Pan-like, in an eternal childhood. She is prone to flights of fancy and whimsy--she speaks often of wanting to carry Constance off to the moon to protect her, and of the many wonderful ways the moon is different from their home--and is obsessed with protecting their way of life, placing peculiar talismans around their property to ward of change (although she maintains it's to protect them from outsiders). Her childishness also comes out in her emotional outbursts; she breaks dishes when she is angry or annoyed, runs away to hide in the field when she can't have her way, and engages in an increasingly destructive ways to punish her visiting cousin (refusing to speak to him, pouring water on his bed, destroying the watch, filling his room with twigs and leaves, etc).

One of the most interesting elements of the book is the trick it plays on the reader. Jackson's book doesn't have the kind of shocking or twist ending that tries to trick you at the last moment. WHALitC is brilliant in that it basically starts tricking you from the first page. Jackson is teasing the reader with the drips and drabs of information about the poisoning. The villiagers tease and torment Merricat as she walks through town, singing nasty songs at her and whispering behind her back. Constance was accused and tried for the crime, but acquitted, but the town believes her guilty. Yet, to even the most casual reader, the real culprit is not hard to figure out. How many times can a character talk about wishing that others were dead, or daydreaming about their broken bodies before you start to think "Hey... maybe this is the person who killed those other people?"

Some of the most compelling and interesting aspects of the book aren't "who did it", but, rather, the realizations that start to come as the book progresses and it becomes clearer just how out of touch Merricat is with herself. Merricat describes herself walking through the town and the impression is of the proud, wealthy daughter of a family envied by the poorer members of the community, but by the end of the story, Jackson has gradually revealed details that dramatically alter this earlier assessment. Cousin Charles, for example, makes it clear that Merricat is perpetually filthy and unwashed. While this far from excuses the treatment of the family by the town, it certainly casts Merricat's interactions with them in a different light.

This is the sort of story that many readers will find themselves turning over in their heads for some time. While many readers appear to describe this, rather loosely, as horror, I felt more sad than anything. That's not to say that there aren't disturbing elements (there certainly are!), but their lives are not the stuff or horror, but tragedy. They're trapped by their own mental and emotional illnesses, and by the cruelty of the people living in the town nearby. The novels conclusion is one of the saddest I've read in recent memory.

Very powerful work, highly recommended.



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