We Didn't Always Live in a Castle

            Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle utilizes the destruction of the family unit as a postmodern element through the constant symbolism of the living Blackwood house and Merricat’s interaction and internal dialogue with the house itself. Although it is very clear that the Blackwood family unit has already been destroyed when Merricat murdered its family members, the symbolism of the house stands to demonstrate the effect of the broken family unit as well as the ways in which Merricat and Constance can keep aspects of the destroyed family alive. As Thelma Shinn observes, “the abstractions of safety, protectivity, and acceptance are concretized in a house… As these houses provide protection for the young women who live in them, they produce fear in others… thereby both increasing the protection and attesting to their own reality. Despite its attractions, choosing such private insanity is indeed choosing death over life” (Shinn 54). Jackson utilizes the protection of the house to symbolize the double-edged benefits of safety since the house protects but also shelters its inhabitants from the outside world. Furthermore, Jackson does not place the theme of death immediately inside the Blackwood house after the murders, but rather chooses to have death follow Merricat through the story. Beginning with the scene in which Merricat wishes to see all the villagers in the grocery store, “lying there crying with the pain and dying,” (Jackson 9) Jackson makes it very clear that Merricat imagines death and will most likely cause a death at some point later in the novel. However, although the reader learns that Merricat is actually the murderer that put the arsenic in the sugar, figurative deaths occur throughout the novel that indicate that Merricat wants, and causes, death for the Blackwood family unit.

            Merricat’s mentally unstable tendencies not only make her an unreliable narrator, but the violence and death that surround her entails that she has very little power over her thoughts, her wishes or her actions. Her own tendencies to perpetually follow regimented schedules to maintain the house and the Blackwood property create a paradoxical set of values in which Merricat desires to maintain the house and the idea of family that it represents, but later destroys the house with fire and reveals that she killed the majority of its inhabitants. Furthermore, even though Merricat caused Uncle Julian to become disabled, she constantly thinks that she should be nicer to him; therefore, Jackson makes it very clear that although Merricat’s actions have great impact on the family, Merricat has little power over her own actions. This point regarding the power of children over their actions is reinforced by Thelma Shinn’s observations that, “The awareness of violence is omnipresent; but, while the women externalize it and try to remain in perpetual childhood within protective houses, only the children can acknowledge the savagery… Children, Jackson realizes, have no social power” (Shinn 76). Furthermore, Merricat uses the house and her actions as magical deterrents of bad things like the villagers or Charles; however, since none of her magic works, her failures only provoke her to try more dangerous deterrents until she finally burns the house down by dumping Charles’s pipe into a trashcan of newspapers. Merricat’s dependence on the broken house to reject bad influences demonstrates a larger social message about parenting in general. Jackson indicates, somewhat, that although it is the duty of the family (represented by the house) to guard their children, the children must venture outside their protective houses or risk destroying the family once the outside world rushes in (Merricat and the villagers destroy the house after 18 years of sheltering).

            The character of Charles is a constant reminder of the threat of the outside world if people remain within their protective houses for too long. However, the protective house and Constance gradually allow the outside world to enter with Charles, but this introduction is truly too late since Merricat rejects the outside world by perceiving that, “the house was not secure just because Charles had gone out of it and into the village; for one thing Constance had given him a key to the gates… He doesn’t belong in this house” (Jackson 74). Merricat even relies on the house to protect her from Charles, even though it was the house that allowed Charles in, by thinking that, “asking Charles to go away was the next thing to do, before he was everywhere in the house and could never be eradicated. Already the house smelled of him, of his pipe and his shaving lotion, and the noise of him echoed in the rooms all day long… I hoped that the house, injured, would reject him by itself” (Jackson 78). However, the arrival of Charles is only an introduction to the outside world, but the sudden destruction of the house by the villagers is the inevitable rush that destroyed the family. Angela Hague’s conclusion about the novel supports the argument that Charles is merely the calm before the storm by stating that Jackson’s novel, "is an extended narrative about the inability of the home to protect its inhabitants against invasive destruction, both psychological and physical… Charles… arrives to disrupt the ritualized domesticity of the family members, and his psychological invasion is completed by the physical destruction of the house” (Hague 1). As a result, it is not the villagers or Charles who destroy the Blackwood family unit, but rather the innocent and sheltered Blackwood sisters who allow time to degrade their family until the house is too weak to protect them.

Works Cited

Hague, Angela. "A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.”

 Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies 26.2 (2005): 1. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: The Penguin Group, 2006.        Print.

Shinn, Thelma J. Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Print.