jankp's Full Review: Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Cast...
Most of the villagers consider the sisters to be outcasts, perhaps witches, secluded in their noble-looking castle. Four years ago their suspicion and expressed hatred began when one morning every Blackwood was poisoned except for the two sisters. Uncle Julian survived to spend the rest of his days unable to walk or take care of himself. The older sister in charge of meal preparation stood trial for their murders, but was acquitted from lack of evidence because she had washed the sugar bowls and dishes thoroughly of the evidence.
I have read about real-life witches practicing sorcery, chanting and worshipping different ancient goddesses from Egypt (but not the devil). Constance, 28, and Mary Katharine (Merricat), 18, certainly never chant, worship goddesses or even seem to read books of spells or magick (spelled as I've read that witches prefer to differentiate from hocus-pocus magic) in We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Connie was reading The Art of Cooking once.
As we come to know Merricat, though, who needs to protect the house with three, special words, buries valuable things, knows which mushrooms are poisonous and wishes the villagers and visiting Cousin Charles dead, we realize she could be a witch, but who also needs Connie when she saves her after being forced to flee for their lives.
The Story Begins...
...with Merricat telling us about herself, wishing she had been born a werewolf. She’s on her way into the small town for weekly groceries and library books and soon after we are well acquainted with how she follows the same route watching her brown shoes, we see how the villagers stop to stare and loudly whisper to each other or even sing
“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.”
At home we meet the seemingly sweet Connie, wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian who considers Merricat dead, and Jonas the cat. Through Merricat’s eyes the cat becomes human-like. At first I even thought him a child! No one is physically described by her, maybe their occasional tea guests in the parlor, but we know people or Jonas in how they talk or her feelings about them. She’s terrified of children who are always mean to her and can’t stand to be touched, except by Connie, which is why she finds an awful way to enlighten the easily-swayed sister to the evil of Cousin Charles.
Merricat convinced me she was quite a bit like a solitary witch. She could sense for days a bad change coming into their lives, which was Cousin Charles visiting unexpectedly. She was not blind to his real reason for coming, that of laying hands on their inherited wealth secure in their safe, or to the fact that he was destroying Connie’s relationship with her and the "worthless" to him Uncle Julian. She always called Charles a demon-ghost and once thought,
I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider’s web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling; shut into the body of a dying, buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth...pp. 129
You may be convinced by now, too. Read the book to see how she manages to bury the ghosts of the past by exposing them all, the “castle” and villagers, especially, to the horror of what they’ve become. Will the Blackwood sisters be able to go on living there?
Final Notes
This is my first Shirley Jackson novel, also her first, but she also wrote The Haunting of Hill House and others. It gave me the creeps as I read in quiet fascination. First-person perspectives from a disturbed, witchy teenager are not my usual cup of tea, yet I’m very glad wordwalker’s superb review of the novel got the idea of reading it abrewing inside me! Merricat nudged herself into my heart as she struggled to be accepted and loved.
In 214 pages, this 1962 novel with no chapter titles will be a perfect book to curl up with some night when you need reminding that you’re lucky to have a caring family and friends. Obviously Merricat didn’t feel loved at all four years earlier if she perhaps impulsively poisoned the family members who liked sugar in their tea. I understood her motivations and perceptions as a desperate teenager who had never had a happy life and by the end of We Have Always Lived In The Castle, I wondered if Connie’s love would always be enough for her.
If there is a flaw in the book, it’s being free to imagine what the humans or Jonas the cat looked like rather being told. I don’t consider that much of a flaw, though, because they were still easy to picture through the description that was given. Jonas I imagine as probably a Siamese since he was so quiet and "looked shocked" when Merricat told him what he should do.
Now, is it a coincidence, I wonder, that my last book reviewed was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall? Well, it wasn't planned. It has always seemed to me that my books or movies choose me so they somehow make a patchwork quilt and this spooks me as much as the novel did!
Alone since four members of the family died of arsenic poisoning, Merricat, Constance and Julian Blackwood spend their days in happy isolation until c...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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