Mind Picker: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is all mood and madness, with an unreliable, immature narrator – incanting secret spells, nailing charms to trees – whose endearing relationship with her sister is so charming that the reader is often distracted from the fact that one of them is an unrepentant monster; this slim book is a tragedy with a misdirecting veneer of playfulness; a galvanic disconnect that I felt on my skin; in my teeth. Meet Merricat:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

Right from the start, you can see that something's not right with Merricat. When she walks to the nearby town for library books and groceries, she's met with open hostility (The people of the village have always hated us), and these unfriendly townsfolk could pass for those from The Haunting of Hill House or Shirley Jackson's most famous short story The Lottery. (Much has been written about Jackson's hostile relationship with the villagers nearby to where she lived with her husband; I don't know about that, but it's certainly a recurring motif in her work.) And while at first this animosity seems class-based (the Blackwoods live in the big house, and although there used to be a useful shortcut through their property, it was fenced off at Merricat's mother's urging), the taunting rhyme that follows Merricat up the street hints of darker things:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

We soon learn that six years previous, someone poisoned the Blackwood family with arsenic – killing the girls' parents, brother, and aunt; nearly killing their Uncle Julian and leaving him an invalid under their care – and while Constance had been charged with the crime, she was acquitted at trial. The aged and addled Uncle Julian is trying to capture every detail of the final day of his brother's life for his memoirs, and as he is constantly confirming his facts throughout this book, it makes for a very natural slow unspooling of those events. Meanwhile, Merricat speaks fancifully of flying a horse to the moon, traces protective words into her marmalade, and harbours murderous thoughts in her heart.

I 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 of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

I won't attempt to diagnose what mental disorder(s) Merricat is displaying, but Constance is seemingly an agoraphobe (an affliction that Jackson herself famously suffered with in her last years), and the insularity of their life in the fenced-off manorhouse suits the sisters fine. Whether it's part of the mental illness or she actually believes in her own witchcraft, Merricat does what she can to protect her fragile older sister:

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.

Alas, all the magical charms in the world can't prevent a gold-digging relative from trying to insinuate himself into the girls' lives, and when Cousin Charles shows up unannounced, the plot takes off.

I loved everything about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and especially the delightful disconnect between what was being said and done on the surface and the truths that lie beneath. I suspect that Shirley Jackson, in this her final novel, was playing with her audience's expectations – I kept anticipating the supernatural: Is Merricat (with her spells and her talking cat) actually a witch? Are people interacting with her; could she be a ghost? With all of her rules about what she can and can't touch, which rooms she's allowed to enter, is Merricat some kind of vampire? Or is she simply a sick and damaged young woman? (Merricat seems to be the psychopathic female lead that Gillian Flynn keeps trying to capture.) Even the villagers turn out to be worse, and better, than expected; they're real people, not pitchfork-wielding savages. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that this book revolves around the psycho-sexual fetishisation of food, so I guess you could read it on that level, but to me, it's all mood and madness; the galvanising disconnect between that which is said and that which lies buried underneath.