Shirley Jackson's Small Town Gothic

This week for my American Gothic class the assigned reading was Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published in 1962.

It is the story of two sisters, Constance and Merricat Blackwood, who are living in an isolated house on the outskirts of a small town, with only their disabled Uncle Julian and a cat for company. The novel opens following a family tragedy years earlier where the rest of the family were poisoned with arsenic disguised in sugar: we later learn that Constance, the preparer of dinner that fated night, has been acquitted of murder. Despite this, the past continues to haunt the sisters and the Blackwood family home they remain holed up in, hidden from the stares of the rest of the town who refuse to leave them alone. Later, a mysterious Cousin Charles arrives, a gothic villain who comes looking for money and intends to wed Constance. The novel ends as Merricat, desperate to protect her remaining family, sets fire to the house and the two girls are left sat on the step of their 
burnt out home.

It may not sound like a stand out storyline, but the novel is excellently written and superbly executed, with an air of eerie foreboding present throughout. Evidence that Jackson is a skilled writer is the fact that the main point of the plot, the poisoning of the family with arsenic, does not actually take place within the novel's frame, but before the story even begins.

The book explores several gothic themes. The small town setting results in a gossiping community who are both thrilled and repulsed by the Blackwood tragedy and as a result they turn the girls into fearful 'others' who reside on the outskirts of the town and on the edge of what is considered the norm. Although the setting is never made explicit, it is likely that Jackson considered this to be in New England, based upon her own experiences of small town exclusion. When she moved with her husband to New England she was ostracised from the community because of her intellectualism,  thus  she uses her own experiences to narrate a tale about villagers prejudicing interlopers. As a response to their societal rejection, the Blackwood sisters become agoraphobic, confining themselves to their house due to their feelings of existential terror. Jackson herself also suffered from the condition. The small town pastoral landscape becomes threatening, a recurrent theme explored by Jackson in her literary work, where the wholesome feel is displaced by an uncontrollable evil.

Another major symbol in the novel is the Blackwood house itself, which becomes a character in its own right, composed of "bones" with a "stern, unwelcoming face". Often in gothic texts, houses are given an agency; rather than designating something temporal, they control and allegorise their occupants, something we certainly see unfolding in the narrative. The house becomes the phantom inheritance that Constance and Merricat must fight off in order to free themselves.   

There is so much more to say about this rich literary text. I would really recommend it and it's only a short read; I found myself speeding through it. In class we also looked at Jackson's short story The Lottery, which is even more chilling and definitely worth a read.