We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
A Masterpiece From A Master Hand
Visitors call seldom at Blackwood House. Taking tea at the scene of a
multiple poisoning, with a suspected murderess as ones host, is a perilous
business. For a start, the talk tends to turn to arsenic. It happened in this
very room, and we still have our dinner in here every night, explains Uncle
Julian, continually rehearsing the details of the fatal family meal. My sister
made these this morning, says Merricat, politely proffering a plate of rum
cakes, fresh from the poisoners kitchen. We Have Always Lived in the
Castle, Shirley Jacksons 1962 novel, is full of a macabre and sinister
humor, and Merricat herself, its amiable narrator, is one of the great
unhinged heroines of literature. What place would be better for us than
this? she asks, of the neat, secluded realm she shares with her uncle and
with her beloved older sister, Constance. Who wants us, outside? The
world is full of terrible people. Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic
system of rules and protective magic, burying talismanic objects beneath
the family estate, nailing them to trees, ritually revisiting them. She has
made a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us

against the distrust and hostility of neighboring villagers. Or so she
believes. But at last the magic fails. A stranger arrives--cousin Charles,
with his eye on the Blackwood fortune. He disturbs the sisters careful
habits, installing himself at the head of the family table, unearthing
Merricats treasures, talking privately to Constance about normal lives and
boy friends. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means,
Merricat adopts more desperate methods. The result is crisis and tragedy,
the revelation of a terrible secret, the convergence of the villagers upon
the house, and a spectacular unleashing of collective spite. The sisters
are propelled further into seclusion and solipsism, abandoning time and
the orderly pattern of our old days in favor of an ever-narrowing circuit of
ritual and shadow. They have themselves become talismans, to be
alternately demonized and propitiated, darkly, with gifts. Jacksons novel
emerges less as a study in eccentricity and more--like some of her other
fictions--as a powerful critique of the anxious, ruthless processes involved
in the maintenance of normality itself. Poor strangers, says Merricat
contentedly at last, studying trespassers from the darkness behind the
barricaded Blackwood windows. They have so much to be afraid of.
--Sarah Waters
Personal Review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by
Shirley Jackson
Today Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is best recalled for the story "The
Lottery," originally published in 1948, and the novel THE HAUNTING OF
HILL HOUSE, published in 1959. But although these two works are
indeed among the finest of her work, they are not her only work; during her
short lifetime Jackson produced a seemingly endless stream of stories and
essays, two memoirs, four books for children, and six novels--of which WE
HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, published in 1962, was her last.
It is an astonishing work, perceptive, deceptively simple, remarkably artful,
and both disturbing and terrifying in a way that defies easy description.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Mary Katherine Blackwood, an
eighteen year old, and begins with what would seem a commonplace
event: Merricat, as she known, has gone to town on a series of errands.
But the trip soon acquires an ugly tone. She is afraid; she is angry; the
town is ugly; the people in it are openly hostile to her. She returns as
quickly as possible to the Blackwood property, a large, heavily wooded
tract of land accessible only through padlocked gates--and to the Victorian
mansion in which she lives with her sister Constance and their invalided
uncle Julian.
As the novel progresses it becomes apparent that Uncle Julian cannot
leave the house and Constance will not leave the house--and although the
reasons are different for each the actual cause is the same. Six years
earlier the Blackwood family sat down to a meal that included blackberries
served with arsenic. Uncle Julian survived, his health destroyed and his
mind clouded; Mary Katherine, having been sent to bed with supper for a
childhood misdeed, escaped the poison; and Constance, who prepared the

meal and who never took sugar, was accused of the crime. Although
acquitted in court, she was deemed guilty by the town--and the trial was so
traumatic she has since been unable to bring herself to leave the house.
Although they occasionally receive visits from old friends who knew the
family before the tragedy, the three live in isolation, and the sense of
paranonia that pervades their lives warps and twists each in unexpected
ways. Mary Katherine in particular has fancies and imaginings, often
engaging in childhood acts of magic that would seem more appropriate to
a child than a young woman. But the lure of the family's wealth is very
strong, and it draws a relative to their door--cousin Charles.
Constance finds Charles appealing and takes seriously his urging that she
throw off her isolation, but Mary Katherine recognizes his motives as
purely mercenary. The battlelines are quickly drawn, Mary Catherine on
one side and Charles on the other, with delicate Constance caught
between the world in which she feels safe and the life she might have
outside it. Charles will find that a family in which an infamous and
unsolved murder has occurred does not necessarily enjoy intrusion from
the outside, and the nightmare is soon upon them all.
Mary Katherine is hardly an unbiased narrator, and her perception of the
town and its people, cousin Charles, Uncle Julian, and her adored sister
Constance is colored by her clearly abnormal thinking--but Jackson plays a
truly unexpected card, drawing a sharp comparison between the more
attractive qualities of Mary Katherine's abnormality and the singularly
disasterful normality of Charles and the outside world he represents. The
result is moody, disquieting, and quietly terrifying, and Jackson is careful to
leave many key questions unanswered, thereby driving a sense of
ambiguity ever deeper into the reader's mind.
If your taste runs to the like of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, you may
find Shirley Jackson a shade too delicate for your liking: there will be no
ghosts, no vampires, no overtly evil people doing overtly evil deeds. But to
my mind Jackson is all the more effective precisely for that, a brilliant writer
who has no need of the obvious in order to chill you to the bone. WE
HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE is a masterpiece, and I strongly
recommend it.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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