Welcome to "What I Learned," a blog about reading that has helped my writing that Conor Gallagher has wroten. There might be spoilers, but I'll let you know!
Today, I learned: Titles Can Change the Whole Story, or Castles Aren't Just for Fairy Tales
First, a quick recap in case you haven't taken the time. Before we get into it, though, I can fully recommend reading this one and anything else by Shirley Jackson. She is, truly, one of the greats.
Mary Katherine Blackwood appears to not give two shits. And it's glorious. She and her sister, Constance, live up on the hill, both metaphorically and literally. Just outside a small village, tucked between 'downtown' and a highway leading to 'the city,' the sisters live with their ailing Uncle and one of the less creepy cats in American fiction.
Their house is grand; stuffed to the rafters with signs of Old Money and generations of wedding china, and wedding silver, and coveted heirlooms...and a sugar bowl. The sugar bowl was washed. That detail will make more sense once you've read it, but to avoid spoilers, because I seriously can't do that to you or Ms. Jackson, let's just say there's something wrong with sugar and it isn't the empty calories.
Now, we open with Mary Katherine---called Merricat by her adoring sister and the taunting villagers---going into town for some errands. She plays this out like a game, invoking spells and rules, to protect herself and her elder sister. But not everything works. The villagers still notice her. Mock her. Threaten her. As a reader, you're left wondering why.
In superb Jackson fashion, you eventually find out something went down six years ago and all the villagers blame the young sisters. (They're 18 and 28-ish. Birthdays stopped becoming important for them at some point). This constant danger in the outside world pushes the sisters closer together, but also further into their exile. This is only made all the more tragic when you consider Jackson's own agoraphobia, her AWFUL!!!! husband and when you find out what actually happened with the sugar and why there are so many extra chairs at the dining room table.
Regardless, their curated life--fragile as a cotton candy dome--limps along until Cousin Charles arrives.
And that's all you get to know because I once again implore you to read it. But also because the goings-on of one of the most unlikeable characters I've ever read ((Cousin Charles) who was allegedly modeled after Jackson's husband!?) is not the focus of my tale here today.
Instead, it's the castle.
Much like in one of Shirley Jackson's most famous stories, The Lottery, there is a sinister air afoot in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The same can be said for The Haunting of Hill House, another of her greatest works, and tons of horror ranging from Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt to Goosebumps by R.L. Stine. No, not that other Goosebumps that everyone was thinking of and therefore made my citation necessary.
But where does this air come from?
We experience the story from Mary Katherine's perspective, meaning we're living through an unreliable narrator with a penchant for schadenfreude, burying objects and, like, kinda magic(?), but it's more than that. I'd argue it's something a bit unique to Jackson. You can tell right away something is atypical about Mary Katherine. She's unapologetically sinister and superior. She's transparent, at least to the reader, in her superstitious beliefs. Nothing about Merricat screams "You should believe me." The key to Jackson's work here is that the uncertainty doesn't stop there with her unreliable protagonist.
And thus, we begin to speak of castles.
Stalwart, stone and ideally impenetrable, castles bring to mind a certain type of story. I'd argue fairy tales, or perhaps more recently Game of Thrones with some Lord of the Rings betwixt the two.
In the case of Jackson's tale, the eponymous castle is never actually mentioned. No one ever refers to the Blackwood home as a castle. Not the villagers, not fantastical Merricat. None of the three (sometimes four) Blackwoods that live there. In fact, I'm such a good lil blogger that I just reread a paragraph where I thought Mary Katherine might refer to the house-as-castle but she didn't so I'm taking that paragraph's word for it.
What's the point of all this rambling, you may be asking? I think Jackson purposefully didn't declare the house a castle in anywhere but the title. I think she had a greater motive than just not wanting to state the title throughout the work a la Will Smith in the seminal classic "Suicide Squad."
The motive---*LAW AND ORDER:SVU noise*---was to trip up our perceptions of the universe as readers. Now, if you read any sort of scholarly critique on Lived in the Castle, which I took the delighted liberty of doing, it becomes clear that most everyone agrees the story is about Jackson's abusive husband, her agoraphobia, her two daughters---exemplified by Constance and Mary Katherine, though heavily altered---and the town in which she lived, where she felt like an outsider.
It is because of this near-certainty that I'm confident Jackson had something else at work here. Why would she be obtuse about the time and location if everyone already had it in their minds where this was all meant to be taking place? Why would she mention a castle without explicitly saying, "Here's the castle?"
You can argue reasons having to do with style, or not wanting to piss people off and feel even more ostracized or that when the story was published everyone just assumed it was a modern tale, but I think those answers are the same strength or weaker than my own.
I think Jackson didn't tell us an exact time period or locale because she didn't want to. I think she wanted an eerie gloom over the "village" and the highway and the city.
As I said earlier, the word "castle" inspires fantasy and the like, at least in me. Thus, when I first started reading, I was ready to hear about horses and swords...maybe a lance? Then, we get some more context. A village with a junkyard. A coffee shop with stools. This narrows down the universe, perhaps to within a century or two. But why not expand then? Why not make it certain?
For example, when Mary Katherine is in the coffee shop, there's no radio playing. No mention of a jukebox or a television set. The cash register isn't mentioned. No art or technology is referenced. When she's in the grocery, again, no technology. There is mention of a cooler in the Blackwood home, but that could easily mean an ice box which were already common in the early 1900s. Cars are mentioned alongside ancestral pocket watches. The fire is contained, but by unknown means. Constance cooks on a stove heated by an unknown implement.
My favorite little "Huh?" detail is that all the Blackwood women who have married into the house have their wedding china and wedding silver and Constance has even lost track of who everything used to belong to and OHMYGOD HOW LONG HAVE THEY LIVED IN THE CASTLE?!?
Oh, right....
None of this is shocking or meant to debunk any particular cause. I'm just pointing it out because I think it was on purpose. I think Jackson assumed that we would assume and wanted to constantly keep the reader off balance. None of the preceding details would have changed the narrative much.
If Mary Katherine and Constance had hidden away in an actual castle versus what I imagine is some sort of Tudor-style house, the fallout from their actions wouldn't be altered. Just the same, a gang of villagers storming a castle and storming a house has about the same outcome. The Beast had a castle and look what happened to him!
Wait, he got turned into a twink.
Okay, well, never mind!
My point is, while I was reading, the images in my head kept switching around. The sisters' hairstyles, their clothing. The design of the kitchen and the appliances within. All of it kept bouncing through time and I loved it. It speaks to Jackson's power as a storyteller that her book can exist in multiple ears, to its benefit! and almost by omission.
There is no grand twist at the end, at least not in reference to what I've been trying to unpack here. The setting and time do not have an effect on the story, but rather, on the reader.
It's a similar sensation to the one I encountered in Picnic at Hanging Rock. (You can read about that here). It's an unease, a shakiness and certainly something that the Blackwood sisters of The Castle must feel. I imagine it's something that Shirley Jackson must have felt as well, and maybe that's why she's written We Have Always Lived in the Castle this way. Maybe she was stuck up there, in a trembling tower, and just wanted some company.
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If you liked what you just read, consider following me on twitter and instagram @conorsaidwhat. I post about writing stuff and make stupid jokes there. Hopefully soon I'll be able to tell you some book news!
I have loved Shirley Jackson since I was a kid and will probably love her forever. That fact should not change your mind about going to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle as soon as you can.
There's also TONS of other fun questions to talk about and ask regarding this book (For real, how long have they lived in the castle? Why didn't they get the Rochester house? Why did the thing with the sugar happen?!) and I'd love to chat about them. Hit me up!
I hope you'll pick this one up from an indie shop near you (You can use IndieBound to help find your local store) or a library. I read it in a collection of Jackson's works called "Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories" published by The Library of America and edited by Joyce Carol Oates. If you're looking to add more of Jackson's work to your shelves, I think this is a great way to go. Try not the use ~tHe RivEr~.
SAGA by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan is next. Until then, I leave you with
ONE FINAL DUMB OPINION:
Merricat is not a great nickname. It's not, like, bad. But it's not great. And it invites mischief. So, maybe the other Blackwoods got what was coming.
The end.
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