words in scarlet ink

My first experience with Shirley Jackson was when I was 12 or 13. We read “The Lottery” in 7th grade English, with one of the best English teachers I ever had. Her name is Mrs. Gallery and she still teaches at MESMS, as far as I know. She only taught me valuable stuff (grammar and how to critically read a story), and she encouraged my love of writing. I still see her sometimes, and she is still awesome.

Anyway, “The Lottery” scared the pants off me in 7th grade. It started out as this fairly normal town gathering and morphed into reality gone tits up. You can read the full text of it here. There’s no point in my spoiling it, it’s only eight pages.

The stuff that has always scared me the most has always been the stuff where, in the story, everything seems entirely normal but then reality is distorted and goes awry. I suppose a better word to use is “haunted” rather than scared. You aren’t scared for long, but the story freaks you out, and it sticks with you. The TV show ‘The Twilight Zone’ used this technique routinely, usually to make a point about society. Neil Gaiman uses this technique in his writing. Stephen King is famous for it.

Stephen King was influenced by Shirley Jackson.

In his book Danse Macabre, King calls The Haunting of Hill House one of the most important horror stories of the 20th century (there’s a plot synopsis here, be careful of spoilers if you care about stuff like that). My post on the book is here.

As time has gone by, I’ve become more and more enamored of Shirley Jackson’s writing. I avoided it for so long after “The Lottery” because it was so disturbing to me. Now that I’m older, I’ve embraced it.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle focuses on the last remaining members of the Blackwood family – two damaged sisters – Merricat and Constance, as well as their uncle, Julian. Everyone else is dead.

Constance is mild mannered and unable to leave the house or go very far into the grounds – she was tried for the murders of the rest of her family, but was acquitted, and has subsequently thrown herself into ridiculously meticulous housework and gardening. She is about 28 and seems to suffer from some form of agoraphobia.

Merricat – short for Mary Katherine – is wild, very in tune with nature, and makes trips into town twice a week to get groceries and library books, where the townspeople torment her (having never liked the wealthy Blackwood family and believing her sister got away with murder). She is very protective of her sister. Uncle Julian is old and feeble, writes and rewrites notes he is compiling for a family history, and is fully dependent on Constance for care.

It is mostly through Uncle Julian’s ramblings that we learn what happened to the rest of the Blackwood family – Merricat’s and Constance’s parents, younger brother, and Julian’s wife – their deaths having occurred six year previously.

Conflict arrives in the form of “Cousin Charles,” who comes to woo Constance, obviously seeking the family fortune, and things begin to come undone. Merricat and Charles are openly hostile, and Julian becomes increasingly disgusted with him. He seems to realize most clearly that Charles is only after Constance for her money.

Merricat is a fascinating character. She spends a lot of time on the family grounds and outdoors and is an entirely unreliable narrator. She loves her sister and works hard to be kinder to her uncle, and has a very close, almost telepathic relationship with her cat, but she’s a very wicked girl, and bordering on sociopathic. She’s a practitioner of sympathetic magic, and has various magical safeguards placed around the home. It’s Merricat who knows that a change is approaching (in the form of Charles) and it is Merricat who eventually, destructively, drives him from the home.

The stuff I’ve read by Jackson so far has always left me feeling disturbed but also claustrophobic and this story was no exception. The sisters are isolated to begin with – both physically by distance and socially as outcasts – and by the end it feels as if the walls are closing in around you, as the sisters choose to remain alone, unseen, and fully cut off from the outside world (even choosing to eschew the few people in town who considered the Blackwood sisters their friends).

One of Jackson’s recurring themes in her stories is “otherness,” and again, that plays a major role here. The Blackwoods are accused by the townspeople of thinking of themselves as “better” than the others due to their wealth, and it does seem that (in Merricat’s case, at least) they consider themselves above the other members of their community. It’s not uncommon to see stories set in New England (as this one is) to have otherness as a theme. For an area of North America that was founded because they were “othered” by the English, they had no problem “othering” people who were different than they were, and this odd juxtaposition has been a recurring theme in New England-set stories for years, not just in Jackson’s stories.

How this otherness affects a family and a community is explored in Jackson’s story. Further, the strangeness of the character and relationships that run through the story is also explored. Stuff that is weird (and it IS weird) is treated as completely normal. Merricat is 18, but is a devil-may-care trickster who clearly has not grown up. Constance is about 28, but there is a complete lack of sexual being about her, which begins to awaken when Charles appears, but quickly disappears again when he is exposed by Merricat for what he is.

Jackson moved with her husband to North Bennington, VT, where he was a professor at Bennington College. In Vermont, they were met with anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism, and according to Jackson scholars, the town in We Have Always Lived In The Castle is recognizable as North Bennington.

I loved this book, and highly recommend it. Unlike other stories, I have tried very hard not to spoil the major twists of the story. It’s a short one (150ish pages). Enjoy it.