We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.”

Throughout the book gender roles will be turned inside-out without respect to tradition. In the village Merricat hates, she observes that the concerns of men turn them into ineffectual gossips who busy themselves with worthless tasks away from home while the women are worn to nubs doing all the important domestic work.

“Our father brought home the first piano ever seen in the village. The Carringtons own the paper mill but the Blackwoods own all the land between the highway and the river.”

Merricat makes her family’s wealth an important aspect of her own personality here. Her individuality and expansiveness of imagination is linked directly to her freedom to roam her family’s vast estate, free of money concerns.

“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!”

In the village, news becomes gossip, and gossip becomes stories and poems. As Merricat is only 18, this transformation happens at the speed of superstition. In the schoolyard chant with which the children taunt Merricat, her sister Constance is a known murderer, no matter what a court of law might have said six years ago.

“Today she had come to the end of the garden, and I saw her as soon as I came around the turn; she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her.”

Constance is agoraphobic and never leaves the house and garden. This suits Merricat, who needs the people in her life to be orderly and unresisting.

“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.”

Merricat practices sympathetic magic, weaving protective spells out of items of personal significance. In this case, these items represent Merricat’s vast and prejudiced watch over the lands her father once owned.

“All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.”

Food is an important element of the story, which links Constance to a daily activity and in continuity with her female relatives, both dead and alive. Like all Blackwood activities, however, this activity has taken on a sour and obsessional note, removed from notions of either pleasure or sustenance.

“I found a nest of baby snakes and killed them all; I dislike snakes and Constance had never asked me not to. I was on my way to the house when I found a very bad omen, one of the worst. My book nailed to a tree in the pine woods had fallen down.”

Merricat’s magic has a disturbing opposite pole; she sees signs and portents everywhere, which her magic is designed to ward off. Beating back these bad vibes sometimes comes at the cost of wholesale murder, as in the case of these unfortunate baby snakes.

“I knew already that he was one of the bad ones; I had seen his face briefly and he was one of the bad ones, who go around and around the house, trying to get in, looking in the windows, pulling and poking and stealing souvenirs.”

In spite of his namesake, Charles Blackwood is a stranger to Merricat, who decides he is an enemy from his first appearance. To Merricat, strangers are no different than other vermin, like rats and raccoons, who craftily seek to enter the home.

“Behind him, the kitchen door was open wide; he was the first one who had ever gotten inside and Constance had let him in.”

Like a vampire, Charles has to be invited into the home to break Merricat’s intricate web of protective spells. This temporarily allies Constance to Charles and leaves Merricat alone to scheme toward a return to what she considers normalcy.

“I watched her while she swept up the glass; today would be a glittering day, full of tiny sparkling things.”

When Merricat’s attention is at its sharpest, it is due to an object of fixation, like broken glass set before her path. Once her routine is broken, she experiences both the pleasure and pain of needing to return order by any means at her disposal.

“I’m just saying that I don’t want to talk about Connie and that bad time.”

“I shall be forced to invent, to fictionalize, to imagine.”

“I refuse to discuss it any further.”

Without his papers and endless reconstructions of the crime that took away his health and vitality, Uncle Julian is forced to “invent” the past. When Charles forcibly disconnects Uncle Julian from this vital lifeline, Merricat gains an ally in her war against Charles.

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

The moon is a place Merricat would like to take Constance. It is a place Constance has sense enough to passively resist until the end of the book. On the moon, Merricat makes up the rules, not only of social life but also of physical reality.

“I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings; would the people in the village be waiting for me, glancing from the corners of their eyes to see if I was coming, nudging one another, and then turn in astonishment when they saw Charles?”

Merricat has zero empathy with the other people around her or with her natural environment. When she is not there to give them life and meaning, people and landscapes simply cease to exist. Merricat’s conception of the world is entirely self-willed.

“I never realized until lately how wrong I was to let you and Uncle Julian hide here with me. We should have faced the world and tried to live normal lives […] You should have boy friends.”

When Constance struggles to escape Merricat’s grasp, she has only Charles’s weak conceptions to guide her. As she mentions Merricat’s getting a boyfriend in this scene, she involuntarily laughs. The idea could have only come from outside and is seen as a ridiculous abstraction.

“Eliminating Charles from everything he had touched was almost impossible, but it seems to me that if I altered our father’s room, and perhaps the kitchen and the drawing room and the study, and even finally the garden, Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized, and would concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and so would go away.”

The war between Merricat and Charles is a war of values, particularly in regard to material objects. Each is a ghost to one another, and each is unable to see the value of the things that surround them. For Merricat, objects have spiritual value; for Charles, all things come down to their monetary value.

“My niece Mary Katherine died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder. But she is of little consequence to my book, so we will have done with her.”

In spite of Julian’s prejudice against fabrication, he has woven himself into a cocoon of illusion that has resulted in him being cared for by his attempted murderer. In his worst flights from reason, Merricat is dead, and Constance is his still-living wife.

“Our beloved, our dearest Mary Katherine must be guarded and cherished. Thomas, give your sister your dinner; she would like more to eat”

“Dorothy–Julian. Rise when our beloved daughter rises.”

“Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.”

This imaginary but terrifying scene represents a final revelation of Merricat’s character. She is not a mere eccentric teenager, but a megalomaniacal narcissist who believes her murdered family worships and adores her in permanent spectral bondage.

“The roof pointed firmly at the sky, and the walls met one another compactly, and the windows shone darkly; it was a good house, and nearly clean.”

Merricat takes a moment to adore the solidity and safety of her house on the day before it burns. There is an ambiguity about who is at fault for starting the fire; Charles, who carelessly smokes in the house, or Merricat, who throws his burning pipe into the trash.

“Should have burned it down years ago.”

“And them in it.”

It is not the fire that sends the villagers into a frenzy but rather the extinguishing of the fire by the local fire department. Half-burned, the house becomes more of a symbol of something half-buried and dangerous, and it whips the mob into an irrational frenzy.

“‘I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.’

Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. ‘The way you did before?’ she asked.”

Every sign exists that Merricat was the one who poisoned the family meal, yet this is the first time either of the girls have acknowledged it. Both Blackwoods are masters at compartmentalizing trauma.

“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 dinner-room table waiting for Constance to bring them their dinner.”

Merricat’s engagement with “things” has formed an ongoing and exhaustive protective spell with the house at its center. Now that the house is compromised, Merricat’s protections have vanished, leaving her vulnerable to thoughts of the past. To her, it is as if the murders are to be prosecuted all over again, at least until she can weave a stronger spell.

“I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong fairytale.”

Jackson has set out to rewrite a fairytale in a modern context, using the principles of a realistic setting and a sociologically driven plot. To her, as to many mid-20th-century writers, the mysteries of psychology stand in for the mysteries of magic.

“But I’m sure they misunderstood the people last night; I’m sure Constance was upset, and I must tell them that nobody meant any harm.”

Helen Clarke here shows the limits of merely “meaning well” by papering over hard truths with false optimism. The world of the Blackwoods and that of their cousin and the village are fundamentally at odds and can never be reconciled. Both factions bear too much guilt and history for there to be a reconciliation.