If you read American fiction, you have probably encountered Shirley Jackson's writing at some point, even if you don't remember her by name. She's especially known currently as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (thanks, Netflix), but she first made her name rather earlier than that, with a 1948 short story in the New Yorker. In that story, a small New England farming town is engaging in an annual tradition. It's quite a festive occasion, except...
If by some chance you haven't read that story (and believe me, if you've read it, you know exactly what story that is, just from that one sentence), do please take a moment to follow that link. I'm not going anywhere.
...
So, why do I bring this up? Well... I think I could safely argue that We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place in, if not the same small town, one very nearby, perhaps just a few miles farther down the highway from Haunting's Hillsdale.
This is a story told to us by the very neurotic tomboy Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), about how she and her older sister, Constance, came to live alone in their family home. Merricat is... Something. She's eighteen years old, but in a similar fashion to Nell in Haunting, she seems somehow emotionally stunted, younger than she actually is. She's obsessed with mushrooms and other forest foraging, buries treasures as protective amulets around the house, and has a very hard time with breaking rules that determine what she is and isn't allowed to do. I'm going to be honest, with her intense reliance on schedules and ritual, not to mention the insinuations by the most obvious "villain" of the piece (not that he ever actually states it outright) that she belongs in an institution , I read her as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that's never stated in the text (not that the "spectrum" was even an idea at the time). That or she's actively a budding Baba Yaga sort; she does specifically say early on that she prefers her library books to be fairy tales.
Merricat opens right up with laying out for the reader that she has Constance, and all the rest of her family is dead (though this isn't completely accurate), along with making it rapidly clear that the people of the village all hate her family, mercilessly teasing her whenever she goes into town to get groceries and library books. Constance, who is rather mentally broken in other ways, unable to handle other people for the most part and rarely willing to leave their manor house any further than the edge of her vegetable garden, is acting as the caretaker for the family, primarily for their sick Uncle Julian, the only other member of the household, who is wheelchair-bound, half-senile, and obsessed with trying to recreate the night that, according to the schoolyard rhymes that continually appear, Connie poisoned the whole family with arsenic in the sugar. After all, Connie could never be that subtle, and if she was the poisoner, why didn't she do something earlier in the day, like the rarebit at lunch?
This mystery floats through the whole book. Julian survived the poisoning because he only took a very small amount of sugar on his blackberries for dessert, Constance doesn't especially like sweet things so didn't take any, and Merricat had gotten in trouble for something and was sent to bed without dinner, so wasn't present. It didn't help that Constance, before help arrived, had washed out the sugar bowl, "because there was a spider in it." She really doesn't like spiders.
There are a few visitors, now and then, people who were friends of Merricat's mother and insist on inviting themselves to tea in order to try and coax Constance out of her fear of other people and leaving the safe space that is their home, but Merricat is distrustful of all of them. Anything that might change the routines that she relies on; she gets a chill when Constance even mentions the idea of venturing beyond the garden's edge.
Into Merricat's orderly world comes Charles Blackwood, a cousin from a part of the family that completely cut themselves off when Constance was arrested (though later acquitted) for the mass murder. Charles very quickly insinuates himself into the household, using Constance as his route of choice, and begins efforts to convince her that his way of addressing everything is better, that it would all be better if he and Constance were the only ones in the house, that Uncle Julian should be in a hospital with trained nurses and Merricat should... he never says it outright, but it's clear what he thinks.
Merricat is distrustful of Charles from the start, and Julian seems to agree in his lucid moments. This seems to be borne out as the interloper seems to have no compunctions about making himself completely at home, making use of her father's valuables (after noting the value if they were sold, more than anything else), and continually finding Merricat's buried talismans, none of which are given anything less than an utter rage-filled rant that drives her from the house repeatedly.
Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event. And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety. Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.
So, here's the thing... After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time. They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls. It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically. They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.
Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice. Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost. Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.
It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian. Which... Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline. It's even on Netflix. Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.
Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event. And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety. Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.
So, here's the thing... After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time. They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls. It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically. They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.
Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice. Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost. Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.
It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian. Which... Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline. It's even on Netflix. Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.
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