NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, novel by Shirley Jackson
NOTABLE WORKS
REVIEW: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, novel by Shirley Jackson
First published by Viking Press, 1962.
Reviewed by Rosemary Thorne
TRIGGER WARNING: This review addresses mental health.
Synopsis: Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
My beloved Shirley Jackson passed away when she was 48 years old. It means I am currently six years her senior, which shocks me weirdly as an unfair event. She had four children and left six novels, two memoirs, and almost 200 short stories, many of them awarded. I imagine she went directly to a Spa in Paradise. If such a place doesn’t exist, it ought to be made just for her. Anyway, she’s welcome to find eternal rest in my heart, as she is one of the sacred guardians of my sanity.
Almost all Jackson’s tales show evidence of struggles that are too familiar to me, but the book I feel especially close to is We Have Always Lived in the Castle because I was fiercely bullied when I was a little girl, feel very much like Mary Katherine Blackwood (aka Merricat) in my feelings towards “people”, and my home still bears the lingering shadows of a fire that happened twenty-three years ago while I was inside. I’ve never touched any sugar though.
Introducing one of Jackson’s most well-known works poses a challenge, even within the context of this HWA Mental Health Initiative. Told from a first-person perspective, it provides a clear insight into how a traumatized child employs coping mechanisms to overcome a threatening environment.
Merricat’s quirky rituals to endure her trips into town for groceries and reading supplies are truly fascinating, deeply rooted in superstition and an uncanny connection with nature. Her naive spells to repel unwanted visitors are also great examples of the fundamental power of words to influence thoughts, shape moods, and drive actions, demonstrating an extraordinary perception of the rudiments of magic.
People’s malice—their rot growing within—and the stigma that arises from it, can exacerbate the effects of mental illness, as this work presents multiple scenes of abuse. The torment inflicted by
the neighbors, mostly men, on a defenseless little girl, clearly demonstrates the level of cruelty individuals can reach when acting as a mob.
Jackson’s slow-cooked dread is unmistakable: she serves the macabre in china cups, turning repressed anger into an art, and treating anxiety with the kind of witchcraft that brings about folklore and legends. Very few authors possess her ability to conjure doom in one unapologetic sentence in which the reader suddenly understands a waxing sense of claustrophobia. In this sense, Jackson’s surrealist dialogues and black sense of humor also act as mirrors for all those initiates who know how to chew hatred on a daily basis and overcome its toxicity.
After all, some of us know that we belong in Shirley Jackson’s story: we were ugly broken things before meeting her and, all of a sudden, we become one of her creatures, mastering the craft of the unreliable narrator in our very own lives. As soon as we step into her books, we finally feel at home and our mental health improves notably under the infallible treatment of her voice. This is how we enact delusion and turn into exceedingly charming rarities living happily ever after in Merricat’s house on the moon.
Rosemary Thorne (she/her) is a bilingual Spanish writer, researcher, and translator living in Madrid, Spain. Born in 1968, she joined the HWA in 2019 and served as the Co-Manager of the HWA International Chapter Program until 2023. Her debut novel, El Pacto de las 12 uvas, (The twelve grapes covenant) was published in December 2021. She also translated Edward Lee’s The Bighead into Spanish for Dimensiones Ocultas Press. Her most recent essay, Rosemary’s Baby: A Satanic Camelot, was published in Spanish by Archivos Vola in 2024. Find out more at: https://linktr.ee/Rosemary_thorne and Instragram at https://www.instagram.com/rosemary__thorne/
