Fred Botting argues that the Gothic genre presents a “recasting of the nature of social and domestic fears” where narratives can create “different, more exciting, worlds in which heroines in particular could encounter not only frightening violence but also adventurous freedom” (7). Such a notion that a genre can use the home space as a reflection and reassertion, or a type of pushback to social realities, is essential to understanding “otherness” and power in literature. Shirley Jackson, perhaps most noted for her short story “The Lottery,” questions the mid-century American woman’s role throughout her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published in 1962. Domesticity and horror coexist at the heart of Jackson’s text. The prescribed nature of womanhood makes up much of the work, presented in a Gothicized as well as a blissfully domesticized lens. While the backstory to the novel’s timeline establishes some “frightening violence” and sinister elements, the overwhelming arc takes the heroines into a space that is both adventurous and freeing in its horror while keeping in line with certain cultural conventions: Jackson simultaneously adheres to and breaks mid-century visions of femininity in protagonists Merricat and Constance’s narratives. 

Released a year before Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking feminist text The Feminine Mystique, Jackson’s novel also studies domestic concerns. While both women wrote for the same women’s magazines—publications like Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and McCall’s—often encountering the same difficulties as women writers and homemakers, Friedan denounced Jackson as merely a “Housewife Writer” (57). In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan complains that Jackson’s type of writing is funny without addressing true issues of the everyday woman. Yet what Friedan seems to be missing is that Jackson’s jokes and critiques rely on the domestic space, reexamining its constructs. As journalist and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin argues, Friedan does not recognize how “genuinely subversive” Jackson is in her writing (31). Such subversion extends beyond Jackson’s essays on raising misbehaved children, encompassing novels like We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I would argue against Friedan’s misreading, and suggest that the novel settles on a space that is not entirely separate from the cultural values of femininity that are ascribed to Merricat and Constance. Rather, Jackson uses Gothic tropes of entrapment, ruined families, and destroyed homespace alongside domesticity as a source for the girls’ power and happiness together. Merricat and Constance go beyond the divide of Gothic as sinister and the angel of the house as salvation, as Jackson resists both labels as divided parts, blending the two concepts into an discomforting yet socially “acceptable” representation of femininity.

Before attending to how Merricat and Constance represent domestic values and Gothic forms, it is essential to establish some plot points. The novel begins with eighteen year old Mary Katherine Blackwood, who explains herself to the reader in straightforward terms. The opening passage begins with Mary Katherine’s name, age, likes, and dislikes, ending with a halting jolt: “Everyone else in my family is dead” (Jackson 421). The family’s deaths are not mentioned in the following paragraph, nor are they referenced often in the text. The reader must find themselves contented with not knowing more details about the event, growing closer to “Merricat” as she tells the story of herself, sister, and day to day routine in a rural village that despises her. We do eventually find out that the family, Merricat and Constance’s father, mother, brother, and aunt, were poisoned at dinner one evening at the Blackwood mansion. We learn that Constance was suspected to be the murderer and had been tried for the crime in a public setting, absolved of the poisoning legally but not in the minds of the villagers. We do not learn that Merricat was the one who poisoned the family by putting arsenic into their sugar dish with full clarity until shortly before the novel ends. This suspended truth haunts the novel’s pages, where something is amiss but not generally confronted directly. Thus, the murders cast a phantasmic shadow over Merricat’s narrative. Surprisingly, Merricat remains a pitiable, charming figure associated with white magic and dreaming rather than a cold-blooded murderess. Overall, the stark moments describing the horror that unfolded before the novel opens are forgotten amidst cheery scenes of sisterly love and care for the Blackwood house—often with a sardonic twist.

The girls “have always lived” in the Blackwood castle, suggesting a sort of entrapment within the space. After her opening describing her character, Merricat remarks on the day to day life inside the structure with Constance and her family:

We always put things back where they belonged. We dusted and swept under tables and chairs and beds and pictures and rugs and lamps, but we left them where they were… Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order… and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world (Jackson 421)

In this passage, the collective “we” is inescapable. The narrative reads almost like a cleaning manual, dusting and sweeping various locations. Yet for all the cleaning and arrangement in the passage done by Merricat and Constance, the house remains intact. The girls leave things as was and will forever be, keeping in line with the “layers of Blackwood property” which “weight” the home and “keep it steady against the world.” To disrupt the home space would be to let the home crumble, which is to set off some sort of unknown curse against the individual. In the passage, the only refuge and safety from the outside is the house’s structure and the contents inside. In a sense, the home takes on a relic-infused meaning where the past is contained and the present is kept out. Merricat and Constance are the home’s keepers. This sole focus on caring for the house and their family continues in the novel even after both are destroyed in the eyes of the village community and the reader. They remain inside the space and act together as its caretakers.

Patricia Murphy describes spatial imagery as a “key concern of Female Gothic,” a term coined by Feminist scholar Ellen Moers to encapsulate Gothic writing by women (16). Murphy writes that spatial considerations are important when viewing characters’ homes, which are usually castles “or similarly elaborate edifices, perhaps decaying or partially in ruins” in which “the Romantic heroine comes to view her environs as a source of anxiety and terror, for a domestic space that should be associated with a security and serenity is instead configured into one that poses perpetual peril” (16). Jackson’s novel takes the castle setting in metaphorical terms in the novel’s opening pages, where the horror has already happened and is shrouded in mystery but somehow omnipresent. The physical ties to castle imagery through the mansion’s structure is inescapable as well. The castle does become ruined later in the story, when Merricat sets fire to the structure following a potential “perpetual peril” of outsider infiltration. Acting as the house’s keepers moves beyond the normal duties, the cooking, cleaning, washing, and domestic tidying. The girls must perform their role like mythological guardians, even setting fire to the structure to protect it from outside influence. To not act as keepers for the castle would destroy the girls’ monomaniacal function, entrusted to them with generations’ worth of duty. They would be nothing without their caring for the castle. While these points will be examined more closely later in the essay, Murphy’s points are worthy of consideration when studying the novel. The domestic space does verge on peril, but remains a space of “security and serenity” throughout the storyline.

Whereas some home spaces in Gothic texts are reduced to ruin and fear, the Blackwood mansion cloaks the terms underneath a continual domestic bliss. Such emphasis on domestic duties, cooking, cleaning, caring for the home, protecting a sense of morality, calls to another nineteenth century convention: the “Angel in the House.” Coventry Patmore’s idealized wifely figure begins to permeate cultural practices that deemed what womanhood should look like. To Patmore, beauty was grace and simplicity, lightness and power over the home space. Much like the mid-century middle class housewife, the woman was to care for her sphere, softly treading over the home with airy control. Such softness is in direct contrast with much of the Gothic, where darkness, fear, and the grotesque hold power and control. However in Jackson’s novel, the two main characters embody the “angelic” figure even after their supposed fall from grace by being implicated in their family’s murder. When discussing the remaining Blackwood family members left after the murder critic Roberta Rubenstein describes Constance and Merricat in “Angel in the House” embodied terms, where Constance is “a housebound maternal figure who soothes anxieties and provides literal and figurative nurture” and Merricat “a child who lives in a fantasy world sustained by magical thinking” (319). Femininity is idealized in soothing, nurturing, or magical mindset in Rubenstein’s description, which permeates Jackson’s text. Constance and Merricat’s lives revolve around domesticity, even after the murder of their family and their home burns in a fire Merricat causes to protect their home from a money-obsessed cousin, Charles Blackwood.

In most Gothic novels, there is some threat to the story’s stability and perceived order. In Jackson’s novel, stability exists in how Constance and Merricat behave in their home. Though their domestic happiness should have arguably ended after Merricat kills the family, the true threat to their existence comes in the form of Charles Blackwood. Throughout many Gothic texts the ghost is the phantasmic spectre of a woman haunting abbey halls or a physical form of a maddened woman in the attic, but in We Have Always Lived such a role is filled by a masculine presence. Merricat refers to Charles as a ghost repeatedly in the text, a gender swap that remains in line with how she views her home and its functionality. Charles is an outsider, despite carrying the Blackwood name. He exists as one of the only survivors that could undermine the happiness the sisters have carved for one another following their family’s’ deaths (as Roberta Rubenstein and Lynette Carpenter note in their respective essays “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic” and “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle” note, the only other survivor of the murder is Uncle Julian who is left powerless, mad, and nearly physically paralyzed after the dinner; thus rendered a non-threat to the girls). As he begins to move in on Constance’s affections, Merricat concludes that Charles must be removed from the house in form and presence. She states that “Every touch he made on the house must be erased” (Jackson 485), and that in his presence “The house was not secure…” (Jackson 490). These statements about Charles place a vulnerability within the house for the sisters, no longer a safe space within his presence.

While he is impermanent and transient to Merricat, the house remains a solid image. Her repetition of “the house” calls back to her obsession with its keeping that runs through the novel. When the “layers” within the home get disrupted, Merricat must take action and preserve the fixed, dollhouse-like order for the castle which she and Constance have maintained, reaffirming her duty as the home’s protector. Charles’ objects are scattered throughout the home space, including the sacred drawing room where Merricat’s mother once held dominion. He chooses to take over the father’s bedroom, to Merricat’s displeasure. She obstinately refuses his self-imposed role as the home’s new owner, remarking that  “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; his pipe was sometimes on the kitchen table and his gloves or his tobacco pouch or his constant boxes of matches were scattered through our rooms” (Jackson 494). Instead of the “we” that Merricat uses in earlier in the narrative when talking about the house, Charles’ “him” and “his” repeats. His body’s representative objects, the pipe and shaving lotion, are smells that permeate through the home space like a ghostly presence. His other objects,  gloves, tobacco pouch, and boxes of matches, spread throughout the space in a more physically imposing and visually marked manner. Charles does not belong in the home, there is no room for his ghostly image in Merricat’s perceived domestic happiness. Just as the angel of the house was to expunge the home sphere from bad feeling from the public following a husband’s return from a long day out in the marketplace, Merricat is to ensure her and Constance’s castle is safe from Charles. She decides to fix the situation, using her white magic to start a fire in his room by knocking over his pipe. Much like her poisoning the family’s sugar bowl, an object explicitly linked to domestic sweetness, heirlooms, and dinner time, Merricat chooses to use Charles’ pipe to destroy the house. The pipe is tied to masculinity—smoking, male behavior, and an attempt at patriarchal control. By deliberately displacing the object and causing the fire, Merricat regains agency over the castle again.

Merricat’s fire demolishes a large part of the castle. While the castle does carry some semblance of a haunted past before the fire, in its outward appearance things seem normal. That normalcy is visibly reduced once the mansion burns. The main domestic spaces of the home, including the satin-covered drawing room with its Dresden figurines and kitchen where Constance carefully prepared the family’s meals are reduced to rubble and ash, and the second floor with the bedroom spaces and attic area are entirely incinerated. Merricat openly wonders what will be left of the home when she and Constance remove into the woods, as the structure burns and villagers parade around the space looting its contents and telling horrible tales of its owners. She concludes upon viewing the house after the fire that it is “a castle, turreted and open to the sky” (Jackson 534). While this castle image is entirely Gothicized, how the girls continue to view the now visibly sinister structure somehow remains filled with domestic joy.

The girls are entrapped in the home, as they had been before by their outsider status in the community, the murder forcing a shadow over their existence. After the fire, they are more so contained in their home’s blackened walls—specifically, they are cloistered off in an entirely domestic space: the kitchen. There are no other characters left. Uncle Joseph dies in the fire and Charles flees the scene after being unable to secure the family safe. This entrapment does not bother either, however. The two simply carry on as they have always, cleaning, scrubbing, cooking, and caring for one another. Merricat remarks soon after the burning that “We were going to be very happy, I thought. There were a great many things to do, and a whole new pattern of days to arrange, but I thought we were going to be very happy” (Jackson 538). Here, as before, the “we” returns. She and her sister become a solid base for the house again, able to continue living out their lives in the castle. Their “great many things to do” become commonplace tasks like doing dishes, cooking food, cleaning fragments of the former home, and barricading  themselves—literally and figuratively—against the outside world.  Merricat continues in her story, stating that “Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into happy life” (Jackson 545). Pattern, order, and happiness are found in sisterly love and domestic duties to the house, now a crumbling Gothicized castle.

The tale ends happily for the sisters. Amidst the ruin they carry on their routine as they always have, gathering vegetables from the ashen garden, cooking food, cleaning the skeletal remains of the mansion, shaping clothing for themselves out of scattered fabrics and Earth, assuring one another of their mutual happiness. Instead of horrific final lines remarking on pain, suffering, or absolute terror, Merricat’s ending narrative conveys immense joy. After a few lines of dialogue describing how the villagers view the sisters as cannibalistic witches, Merricat says to Constance “we are so happy” (Jackson 559). There is still a bitterness to the novel’s closing, but overwhelmingly the girls are content with one another. Their domestic sphere remains radiant in its Gothicized isolation. Perhaps Jackson was using this happiness as a sort of ruse, where the outsider reader notices cracks in the narrative Merricat has constructed for herself and her sister. Domestic joy does seem to rest on necessity, driven by prescribed or interpolated roles rather than free will in the text. Overall though, Jackson’s writing acts as a bridge between two uncommonly fixed ideals: the horror and the happiness, which cannot be neatly divided from one another.

Works Cited