We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

Gothic. Eerie. Murder. Family. Gender.

Read for the Literary Society of Berkeley

Rating: 4/5

Pages: 146

Started: 1 October 2023

Finished: 18 October 2023

Summary:

    Merricat and her sister Constance live, frozen in time, in a summer manor in the hills above their town, separated from the down-to-earth town residents by distance, class, and the townies' fear of the girls after the poisoning of the entire rest of their family six years prior. But Merricat and Constance do their best to pay no mind to the townies' heckling and berating. Constance gardens and cooks and never leaves the property. Every Tuesday, Merricat gets groceries from the town. Every Wednesday, she and Constance clean the house from top to bottom. In between, Merricat explores the woods and talks to her cat Jonas and buries unlucky items in the garden. 

    Then Cousin Charles comes to visit, and though Merricat can tell he's more interested in the house's wealth than anything, Constance is enchanted. The infiltration of the girls' castle, however, is not something taken lightly.  

Thoughts:

    I had so much fun reading this book. Merricat was a fascinating character and an even more interesting narrator, and the narration was eerie and erratic and clearly unreliable, which made the entire story a mystery to be untangled and unravelled. The setting was so precise and spooky, and was a fascinating reversal of the usual Gothic story where the newcomer arrives to cleanse the evil-ridden Gothic manner. All the signs of time being stopped were super cool, and Shirley Jackson did a very impressive job of writing a novel both narratively and symbolically complex. Cousin Charles was also very impressive; I'm not sure I've ever read a character made so infuriating in so few sentences. Whether this October or next, I will definitely be reading more of Shirley Jackson's work.

Movie Thoughts: 

    The movie was significantly more on-the-nose than the book, partially because it was not convoluted by Merricat's thought process, and partially because it provided a clear reason (their father's sexual assault) for all the weird and horrifying things that Merricat and Constance did. The movie also played with gender roles a bit more obviously than the book, with Constance's makeup and femininity and 1950's-housewife-like subservience, and Merricat's masculinity at the end of the movie with the button-down and her emasculating murder of Charles. The movie did feel a bit tacky at times, a bit anachronistic, and perhaps would have benefited from a slightly higher budget, but overall I think it's a great example of a book-to-movie that deviates just enough from the book to take advantage of the different medium, but still remains faithful to the spirit of the original material. The only exception to this idea was the murder of Charles, an action on which I have yet to decide how I feel. It was symbolically interesting, but unsurprisingly I think I prefer the novel's ending.