June/July Book Club: We Have Always Lived In the Castle

YES!

The Haunting of Hill House and Hangsaman were two of the best books I read (Shirley Jackson ranks as one of the best novelists of the 20th century for me), and I've been meaning to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle for ages. I hope to get to it within a couple weeks' time. 

I've always meant to read this, but never have. Now I will!

I finished this book last night. I knew nothing about this before I started it.

Wow! It is GREAT! Very unsettling, disturbing, claustrophobic....Beautifully written. A+ use of first person narrator.

Hey, I hated Jane Eyre. I don't hate Gothic. Just that book. This piece of Gothic fiction? It is brilliant.

Oh yes! Jackson does an intense examination of the power of stasis, here. Merricat is aiming for complete control of her routine, the environment, everything. She needs everything to stay exactly the same. Even when things spin out of her control and are decidedly NOT the same, she still exerts her will to MAKE everything the same, damn it! I find the ending to be incredibly disturbing, as it seems like Constance has just been completely subsumed by Merricat's will for stasis.

And yes, Merricat is a World Class unreliable narrator. After finishing the book, I am still revisiting events and relationships, trying to figure out if what was presented by Merricat is even true. In addition to what you point out relating to Charles, I also wonder how agoraphobic Constance really was. Was she really that scared to go outside, or was she actually scared of trying to leave Merricat? The scenes she has with Charles indicate she is someone who at least partly does want to get out of the miserable life she is in.

Also, it is great to realize way near the end of the book that Uncle Julian actually believes Merricat is dead. I mean, at least sometimes? It forced me to revisit earlier scenes and realize that he only ever talks to Constance. What is really going on there? Does Julian know what really happened? Does he even realize he's living with the murderer? I have no idea.


What is also interesting is the way the offerings from the townspeople at the end also functioned as some sort of ritual. Merricat indicates they are doing it out of penitence, but the book makes it seem like the townspeople are also doing this as some form of protection, considering their continued treatment of the house and the girls.

I really loved this book. I hadn't read any of Shirley Jackson's writing before, and I was struck by what an excellent writer she is, and how effortless and unpretentious her prose is. She is an absurdly underrated author.

Like MrsLangdonAlger, I was also deeply disturbed by how sympathetic a character Merricat is and how easy it is to root for her, despite the fact that she's a murderer, and an extremely selfish person who unhealthily shuts herself off from the real world. Jackson does a masterful job of presenting an extremely unhealthy lifestyle and deplorable worldview from the perspective of one who has grown so accustomed to these things that they seem wholly natural to the reader. Like Desert Dweller said, Merricat wishes to keep everything in stasis, to a stifling, creepy degree, and yet, as much as I can see that this is not a healthy way to deal with life, Jackson has created such an effectively-written character in Merricat that it's very easy to empathize with the comfort that her routines and rituals being her and the threat that anything which disturbs these routines and rituals represents. And I think it's that balance between the compassion with which Jackson writes these characters, and the sharply observed critiques of their many flaws which makes the book so great.

I, too, enjoyed the ambiguity that Merricat's narration brings to the novel. For example, is Charles really a greedy interloper who only wants the family's money, or is he genuinely interested in establishing a connection with his cousins and appalled at the constraining isolation in which they are living? When he says to Jonas that Merricat hates him, is he, as Merricat believes, trying to steal away her cat's loyalty to her, or is he trying to win Merricat over by playfully asking Jonas how to get his cousin to like him. When Charles confronts Constance over Merricat burying money and contends that Constance does not seem to understand how money works, is he being condescending and talking down to an grown woman in her late 20s, or is he sincerely trying to help a family member who legitimately does not understand even the most basic principles of personal finance (regardless, Charles came across as being pretty sexist to me in this incident). As for the townspeople, certainly they are prone to cruel gossip and name-calling, but are they really so horrible as Merricat says they are, or is their cruelty largely an unduly caustic way of expressing resentment at a miserly family of classist snobs?

I have one last observation, regarding stasis, and the townspeople at the end of the novel. As has already been remarked in this thread, the leaving of food at the gutted wreckage of the house becomes a sort of ritual on the part of the townspeople. This tradition resembles to me a relapse into a feudal past, and a social system of peasants paying homage to their supposed betters. And yet there is no reason to maintain this classist social hierarchy, and the archaic preservation of this odious social construct is symbolized by the once grand home of Merricat and Constance as it falls into a state of greater and greater decrepitude and disrepair. It reminds me of "The Lottery" (which I read after finishing this book), wherein another odious tradition is needlessly maintained through an aversion to change and a idealized view of said tradition's long history. It also reminds me of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", another story about the citizens of a town's long history of undue deference to a thoroughly unpleasant person (), in this case because she is the daughter of a Confederate general, representing to them a lost cause which in reality is at least as odious in nature as the social constructs which Jackson presents in We Have Always Lived In the Castle and "The Lottery".

Anyway, this was really fantastic, and probably the best book I've read so far this year.