BOOK 199: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE: SHIRLEY JACKSON

BOOK 199: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE: SHIRLEY JACKSON

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson's final work, and was published with a dedication to Pascal Covici, the publisher, three years before the author's death in 1965. The novel is written in the voice of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, who lives with her sister and uncle on an estate in Vermont. Six years before the events of the novel, the Blackwood family experienced a tragedy that left the three survivors isolated from the rest of their small village.

THEMES: The theme of persecution of people who exhibit "otherness" or become outsiders in small-town New England, by small-minded villagers, is at the forefront of We Have Always Lived in the Castle and is a repeated theme in Jackson's work. In her novels The Haunting of Hill House and, to a lesser extent, The Sundial, this theme is also central to the psychology of the story. In all these works, the main characters live in a house that stands alone on many acres, and is entirely separate physically, socially, as well as ideologically, from the main inhabitants of the town. In his 2006 introduction of the Penguin Classics edition, Jonathan Lethem stated that the recurring town is "pretty well recognizable as North Bennington, Vermont", where Jackson and her husband, Bennington professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, encountered strong "reflexive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism".

All of Jackson's work creates an atmosphere of strangeness and contact with what Lethem calls "a vast intimacy with everyday evil..." and how that intimacy affects "a village, a family, a self". Only in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, though, is there also a deep exploration of love and devotion despite the pervasive unease and perversity of character that runs through the story. Constance's complete absence of judgement of her sister and her crime is treated as absolutely normal and unremarkable, and it is clear throughout the story that Merricat loves and cares deeply for her sister, despite her otherwise apparently sociopathic tendencies.

The novel was described by Jackson's biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, as "a paean to agoraphobia", with the author's own agoraphobia and nervous conditions having greatly informed its psychology. Jackson freely admitted that the two young women in the story were liberally fictionalized versions of her own daughters, and Oppenheimer noted that Merricat and Constance were the "yin and yang of Shirley's own inner self".

CRITICAL RECEPTION:We Have Always Lived in the Castle was named by Time magazine as one of the "Ten Best Novels" of 1962. 

In March 2002, Book magazine named Mary Katherine Blackwood the seventy-first "best character in fiction since 1900".On Goodreads, the novel ranks #4 on the list of "Most Popular Books Published in 1962", as voted for by the website's users. 

 (Information from Wiikpeadia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Have_Always_Lived_in_the_Castle)

MY REVIEW: I enjoyed this book immensely and really wished I’d read it sooner. Every now and then you read a book that is completely compatible with one of the selves you have been but not how you are now, and although I am no longer that person I felt her delight at reading this book. As a girl in my late teens I was witchy in the way that Merricat is, I embraced walking barefoot and was superstitious about the world and nature and loved to spend time alone and create stories – this book spoke to her. I am older now but still love a story with people who should be but are not really grown and just the idea of burying things for protection feels me with delight. I would thoroughly recommend this book, and it’s short which was a relief after the very long ‘Infinite Jest.’