Such Devoted Sisters

I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) one summer as a teenager. It’s a work of gothic horror, and a mystery novel. More specifically, it’s a strange, haunting story about a town that fears and is obsessed by two of its residents following the fatal poisoning of their family. I have always thought of it as a book about sisters, about Merricat and Constance, ‘two halves of the same person’. Endlessly self-absorbed, I spent my first reading thinking of my own sister. Our relationship was the most important and the most constant in my life, as we moved back and forth between the homes of our divorced parents. And so, of course, in the heat of the summer, with my sister my main source of company, I felt that this book had been written specifically for me.

I took it entirely literally, considering the world it presented as though it could reasonably become my own. Would I act as Constance did should my younger, more tempestuous sister murder our family by adding arsenic to the sugar bowl before dessert? Would I carry the blame on my shoulders; would I hope for and rely on the same insufficient evidence that resulted in Constance’s acquittal? Would I, for my sister’s sake, sit politely through tea and cake with the gossiping neighbours who thought it was me who had murdered my family? Would I, like Constance, fill the house with things my sister loved to eat – with jars of pickled rhubarb, with eggs, done ‘soft and buttery’, with roast lamb and mint, with tiny, sweet carrots and spring salads? Would I submit to the prison we built for ourselves, a castle I would never leave? Would I decide that’s how I might be happiest? I would, I knew, even then. All I needed was my sister. For my sister, I would be a Constance. In fact in Jackson’s first drafts Constance and Jenny – as Merricat was originally called – were written as friends, two women who plotted the death of one of their husbands. Jackson’s plan was for Jenny to be a character ‘absolutely secure in her home and her place in the world, so much so that she can dispose of her husband without concern’. Merricat and Constance are sisters, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is really a story about women, particularly those who exist outside the place that has been marked out for them. Jackson’s books are peopled with women who live on the fringes, women who can’t or don’t or won’t conform. In Ruth Franklin’s biography, A Rather Haunted Life (2016), she writes of how, from a young age, Jackson herself failed to conform comfortably to the feminine ideal that society, her conservative community and her mother set out for her. As a child, to escape her own loneliness, she wrote stories about lonely people who felt ‘different’ but she never showed them to anyone. She married Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and academic, who had multiple affairs throughout their marriage, and lived with him and their four children in North Bennington in Vermont (a town that served as inspiration for many of her fictional towns). Throughout her career she wrote extensively about her own domestic life: essays and articles for Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day, work that Jackson later collected and fictionalized as Life among the Savages. The domestic work in the house, it is clear, was hers: the cooking, the cleaning, the raising of their children. The world of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is almost entirely domestic. Constance never leaves their home; a journey to the edge of the garden is worth relating to her sister. Merricat ventures into town twice a week, but only ever to satisfy the ‘simple need for books and food’. On the edge of society, the sisters have little to do but cook, and eat, and maintain the house. It is hardly surprising, then, that the narrative is obsessed with food: food as home, food as history, food as threat. Visitors come to the house and refuse to eat, still terrified they may be poisoned. Uncle Julian, who survived the poisoning but lives entirely in the past, mourns that he did not know that the fatal night would be his wife’s last; if he had he would have ‘permitted her more sausage’ at breakfast. Cousin Charles arrives (appearing to charm Constance but clearly after the house) and Merricat sits across the table from him, calmly telling him how she could poison him by putting deadly mushrooms in his dinner. Generations of the family, unnamed great and great-great-grandmothers, live on in the cellar in the form of jars of preserves that Constance will not allow the others to consume: ‘deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women’. ‘Domestic horror’ is a term often applied to Jackson’s works, a phrase that refers to a ‘horror within the family’. But it is important to note that it is not the domesticity, not the cooking or the cleaning, not the relationship between the sisters, that is the horror here. Merricat maintains the boundaries around their house; Constance seems to enjoy cooking (certainly once it is no longer for the whole family) and there’s thought and love evident in the menus that she plans; they have joy in the garden and the many small, fresh, delicious things they find in it. ‘We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.’ Nor is the horror here something lurking in the cellar or something supernatural. The horror is in the weight of the home, the conventional patriarchal family structure. It is the social and domestic burden on women. It is the constantly watchful townsfolk, ‘their flat grey faces with the hating eyes’. The horror lies in the expectation that the sisters would have to defer to Charles, should he insert himself into their home and find a way to stay. Once Uncle Julian dies, once Cousin Charles accepts he has lost, the last of Constance’s obligations are gone. She can live quite happily in the crumbling wreck of the house, needing nothing but her sister. ‘Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.’ There is a fire, at the end. A fire that hints at witchcraft, not least when an angry mob arrives to throw stones at the sisters and destroy their home as it burns. But it is a fire that Merricat has lit, a fire that cleanses, a fire that pushes Charles out, and allows Constance and Merricat to rebuild their life as they want it. They survive, and so does the kitchen. And once the flames have been extinguished, it seems as if the anger and fury of the townsfolk have been extinguished too. The neighbours, those who, early on in the narrative, use the pretext of coming to tea to stare at the sisters, now arrive to invite them to stay ‘until [they] can decide what to do with you’. They’re going to ‘forget all about’ what happened. Merricat and Constance refuse to be a problem that needs solving. They stay hidden in the wreck, they make soup and onion pie, they scrub a fire-damaged mattress to sleep on, they allow the neighbourhood children to fear them, they take in the culinary offerings the townsfolk leave at their door. After so long living outside defined roles, after six years building their own world of safety, how could anyone imagine they would want to return to conformity? They don’t want anyone to decide what to do with them. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson’s last novel (Nine Magic Wishes, an illustrated children’s book, was released a year later in 1963). Soon after its publication she had a nervous breakdown; she had ‘written myself into the house’. Yet she retained a hope of escaping her life as a faculty wife, of leaving behind the domestic weight and societal expectations she had spent her life writing a way out of: ‘The thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of.’ Jackson died in 1965, at the age of 48.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Kate Young 2023