We Have Always Lived in the Castle Commentary

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a masterpiece of horror writing and Shirley Jackson’s last novel. Some consider it to be the apex of her writing career, even superior to The Haunting of Hill House. As someone who reads The Haunting of Hill House every Halloween, there’s no story that trumps it in my mind, but, that being said, I may have to add We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Halloween rotation. The novella certainly demands a second read. And maybe more.

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, we meet the remaining three members of the Blackwood family: Uncle Julian, older sister Constance, and Mary Katherine, our narrator. In the wake of a mysterious family tragedy, our three characters are isolated in their estate by the tragedy’s stigma and the subsequent hatred of the villagers. Marricat, our protagonist, is the only one to venture away from the estate to the village for groceries and library books. Her older sister Constance cares for their uncle and manages the house, while harboring a deep social anxiety after her family’s strange death by poisoning. Though Marricat is the younger sibling and is cared for by Constance, she takes care of Constance, too, in her odd way. With Constance, Marricat displays a tenderness that’s totally absent from her thoughts regarding anyone else— surprisingly cruel thoughts. But in their castle, the little family leads a slow, content existence, until a cousin comes to visit, and everything changes.

This is the third Shirley Jackson story I’ve read, including her well-known short story “The Lottery” and while We Have Always Lived in the Castle is not my favorite, it does demonstrate why I love Jackson’s writing so deeply. Jackson has the uncanny ability to plant horrifying images in your head.

From the second chapter,

“I began dressing Helen Clarke in my mind, putting her in a bathing suit on a snow bank, setting her high in the hard branches of a tree in a dress of flimsy pink ruffles that caught and pulled and tore; she was tangled in the tree and screaming and I almost laughed.”

As I read about the pink ruffles being pulled and torn, I envisioned not fabric but instead blood as her body is torn open and Helen Clarke’s insides spill out. Though Jackson never writes those words, she plays with images that evoke violence in your mind’s eye. If you allow yourself to be swallowed by her writing, you can see things that aren’t there.