We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

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Themes

Womanhood and Domesticity

Merricat is 18 years old, and her sister 10 years older, yet they live in a liminal state of arrested childhood, reenacting rites of adulthood in different guises. Constance is locked in a state of eerie, sterile motherhood, constantly doting over her younger sister. Her domain is the kitchen and pantry, where she is constantly baking and cooking, serving tea, and preparing thrice-daily meals. She leaves the house only to garden, and when she’s not preparing food to be consumed immediately, she obsessively preserves it and keeps it in an unfinished basement cellar, joining rows and rows of generational preserves kept by her family in generations past. Constance is the only one who actually meets the material demands of the family. She attempts to create a state of normalcy for the family that rejects the reality that the family no longer has the social standing it once had before the murders.

This domesticity is underscored by several inversions to the expected order specific to the Blackwood family. If Constance is the doting mother, Merricat and Charles vie to become the active father in charge of protecting Constance. Neither of them is very good at it, but Jackson’s purpose here is to demonstrate that while the role of the patriarch is at best an entirely superfluous one, at its worst it is a parasitic relationship, which constantly demands care and attention without ever contributing anything but an abstract sense of self-justifying order. In her way, Merricat notices this gendered relationship is universal to the village, in which 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” (3). In either case, Merricat and Charles both have their wholly abstract and ineffective orderliness, which demands, without ever expressing the demand, that Constance stays at home.

Misunderstood Genius

Wherever Merricat goes in the village, she evokes ridicule and pity. Underlying those emotions, however, is the emotion of fear; Merricat and her sister are the embodiment of a murderous rage that people in the town suppress with false cheer. In a close-knit town, everyone knows the history of everyone else, but what really happened in Blackwood Manor six years ago is a mystery to everyone, including the reader. Only Merricat knows the truth, and this is because she has had the extraordinary will and self-regard to assert herself within a world of small-minded followers who barely know themselves or what motivates their actions.

Merricat is a force of personality, possessing a rich cosmology of beliefs and a forceful set of preferences and dislikes. By contrast, her closest companion, Constance, lives in a world of shadow, following habits and activities set down by previous generations of Blackwood women. This makes her susceptible to Charles’s influence, which is a near vacuum of disinterest in anything but the monetary value of objects that Merricat, with her genius, has made special through the force of her will. Charles represents the traditional, which also translates to safety for Constance, so she falls easily into the role held by generations of Blackwood women before her.

One can surmise that the villagers live equally shallow lives. They gossip and do very little work but are roused to anger by the mere presence of Merricat. From Merricat’s perspective, she and her sister are creative forces, with her sister creating careful meals from generational expertise and Merricat imbuing objects with power to defend her sister’s ability. By contrast, the villagers are purely negative entities, depicted as slothful individually but purely destructive in direct relation to how many of them are standing in one place at one time. Their orgy of destruction against the Blackwood Manor has no idea behind it at all other than a resentment toward the overall concept of the Blackwoods as a family and village legacy represented by the house. In this sense, Jackson has rewritten an often-told American story that extolls and finds virtue in individual genius and sees collective action as the mindless reaction of coddled and uncreative peasants.

Small-Town Class Relationships

Merricat is highly conscious of the low status of the people she lives near, often pointing out the shabbiness of their houses and the coarseness of their mannerisms. Yet she is not the only Blackwood who bristles with class preoccupation. Helen Clarke is among the only townspeople to show kindness to the Blackwood sisters, making regular visits for tea on Tuesdays. Constance greets her cordially, yet when Helen leaves Constance disparages her, calling her “ill bred, pretentious, stupid. Why she keeps coming I’ll never know” (39). And Uncle Julian keeps calling Charles Blackwood a “bastard,” pointing to the obscurity of his nephew’s place in the family line. Jackson implies that the Blackwood name generated resentment long before it was associated with mayhem and weird isolation. The wealth of the Blackwoods set them apart from the town long before the murders.

One of the contingencies that form Merricat’s view of the world is the vast land her family holds. She is free to roam the lands, surveying the Blackwood property and burying objects as she pleases, thus producing a large protective network against the rest of the world. She is free of money worries as well, receiving a constant flow of money from Constance’s budgetary allowances. She is free to associate a gold watch not with wealth or resale value but as a magical and sentimental object free of money. By contrast, her middle-class cousin has no such freedom. In his reduction of everything Merricat finds valuable down to mere money, we are encouraged to see him as if through the bars of a self-created cage.

This is a story in which murders evoke amusement, pride, and curiosity but almost no sense of grief. Rather, the one note of genuine sadness comes when Constance realizes that all the fine Blackwood things have gone in the fire and that Merricat is now reduced to wearing drapes. Nevertheless, class transcends money in Jackson’s world. The girls are still special and able to live within the royalty of Merricat’s imagination. Even the hateful villagers seem to recognize the power of the Blackwoods, as they continue to bring the women small offerings of food after destroying their house as if to apologize for their brief and pointless democratic flare-up.