Mary Katherine Blackwood is an eccentric and childlike eighteen-year-old, who six years ago murdered most of her family with arsenic. She is the protagonist of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel written by Shirley Jackson in 1962. The book is, macabrely, a study in how sensitive introverts cope with the world. Mary Katherine spends her days wandering alone in the woods, or talking to her sister Constance, who is her favourite person, or to her cat, Jonas. She visits the nearby town to buy food exactly once a week, no more, and resents visitors coming to her house. When they come, she will sometimes hide in the woods.
Near the creek, well hidden, was one of my hiding places, which I had made carefully and used often. I had torn away two or three low bushes and smoothed the ground; all around were more bushes and tree branches, and the entrance was covered by a branch which almost touched the ground. It was not really necessary to be so secret, since no one ever came looking for me here, but I liked to lie inside with Jonas and know that I could never be found. I used leaves and branches for a bed, and Constance had given me a blanket. The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,” and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened.
We learn very little of Mary Katherine’s former life, when her family was still alive. They were an upper-class family, living in an old mansion handed down from generation to generation. The cupboards creak with china brought to the house with many a Blackwood wedding dowry. The cellar is packed with the jams and preserves made by several generations of Blackwood wives. Mary Katherine’s family used to eat ceremonious dinners in a dining room painted white and pale blue. Constance – one of the few to escape death-by-arsenic – was and is the family cook. Although the family kept a high style of living, they do not seem to have kept a servant. When Constance was put on trial for the murder of her family members – for which she was eventually acquitted – the suggestion was made that she resented her slavery in the kitchen. And Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood do seem to have had overpowering personalities. They are sketched very lightly, in very few flashbacks or anecdotes, and the reader is left wanting to know more. One thing we do learn is that Mary Katherine was “disobedient” and was regularly sent to bed without supper, including on the night of the poisoning.
Now Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood are dead, along with their young son, Thomas, and their sister-in-law, Dorothy. Only Mary, Constance and their Uncle Julian survive. The three of them live in the mansion, with Jonas the cat. Constance stays at home, because she is still considered a murderess by wider society. Which means that Mary is obliged to buy groceries in the village, once a week.
In their house, surrounded by fenced private forest, the surviving Blackwoods create a beautiful world of their own. Constance acts like a doting mother to Mary and Julian, working tirelessly in the kitchen, preparing dainty food, sweeping, and washing dishes. When not inside she is in the garden, tending and harvesting flowers and vegetables. She treats Mary like a child, sending her to play in the woods after breakfast. She doesn’t seem to resent the murders, or the fact that she was blamed for them. She seems to be just as happy as Mary, being free of her overbearing parents. She evidently flourishes in her dual role as matriarch and housekeeper. Julian, Constance and Mary get on very well together. Their conversations around the breakfast and dinner table, like their rituals, are serene, genteel and playful. If you squint and try to forget that Mary is eighteen, not eight, then their life seems perfect: Mary the ideal child, with a playful imagination and a love of nature; Constance the ideal mother, doting and hardworking. Uncle Julian makes a likeable father-figure, charming, mild, and intelligent – but also, alas, lacking power. He is a cripple, and his personality is equally nonthreatening.
Life is never perfect, and real families have friction sometimes. When the Blackwoods’ cousin Charles comes to stay for an extended visit, Mary’s dream life falls apart. Charles – who, from the beginning, seems intent on wooing and marrying Constance – leaves pipe ash and newspapers around the house. He takes Mr. Blackwood’s place at the dinner table and sleeps in Mr. Blackwood’s bedroom. He even looks like Mr. Blackwood. Constance starts feeding him lavishly – a worrying sign that her affections are being transferred (and where those go, also goes the centre of power).
While Charles sat in the kitchen in the mornings eating hugely of ham and potatoes and fried eggs and hot biscuits and doughnuts and toast, Uncle Julian drowsed in his room over his hot milk and sometimes when he called to Constance, Charles said, “Tell him you’re busy; you don’t have to go running every time he wets his bed; he just likes being waited on.”
Mary responds to the threat by filling Charles’s bed with dirt and sticks. When he still doesn’t leave – and threatens to have her kicked out – she sets fire to his bedroom, while he is downstairs at dinner. The village fire brigade is called in to put out the fire, and the village residents gather to watch. As soon as the fire is extinguished, the villagers ransack the house. They have always hated the Blackwoods and their haughty ways. They throw stones into the windows, upturn Constance’s harp, smash the teacups and trample the silverware into the mud. Mary and Constance cower outside in the shadows. Charles does nothing to defend the women or the house, but he does fretfully ask the people if they’ve seen the money chest. Uncle Julian dies of a heart attack. When the crowd finally leaves, Charles also disappears, tail between his legs.
In the final part of the novel, Mary and Constance clean the house as best as they can. They rescue two undamaged teacups, which they drink from every day. “We will take our meals like ladies”, Constance says, “using cups with handles”. They close the door of the damp, begrimed dining room – never to open it again. They barricade their back garden with broken furniture. They now live exclusively in the kitchen and garden. Their reclusive existence is sustained by the village wives, who feel so guilty that they take to dropping off cooked meals and groceries on the Blackwood’s porch. As the years go by, the gutted house becomes overgrown with vines. The village children believe them to be witches, and are afraid to walk on their front lawn. At the novel’s end, Mary believes herself to be happier than she’s ever been.
Mary is intolerant of others: their aggression, their ugliness, their unkindness. She succeeds at keeping her integrity: she protects herself and what she holds dear – but at a great cost. Her family members lose their lives. Constance loses her freedom. Worst of all, Mary sells her soul, in exchange for her own vision of peace. She might have been more patient and more brave – putting up with her parents a few years longer, and then moving away and building her own world with a clean conscience. But patience and courage, being virtues, do not come easily. Their growth requires support, such as a church might provide. And a church is what Mary lacked, what the Blackwood family lacked.
Like the Blackwood family, the Catholic church might strike outsiders as haughty and old-fashioned. It might seem, like Mary Blackwood, to be overly defensive and fantastical. But unlike the Blackwood mansion, the Church has God at its centre. And unlike the Blackwood mansion, it is open to all – though with conditions of entry. Although it seeks peace, it never quite finds it, and never expects to find it on earth. Today, the Catholic church is more fractured than ever before – much like the rest of Western society. We may as well embrace it. Catholics might choose to say, with D. H. Lawrence, “I am essentially a fighter – to wish me peace is bad luck – except the fighter’s peace.”[1]
We Have Always Lived in the Castle spoke to the introvert and eccentric in me. I liked Mary and Constance a lot: their regal-yet-innocent ways. The Catholic in me, on the other hand, saw something else in the novel: the terrible ramifications of disengaging from wider society. To practise virtue is to be willing to change, whether by sacrificing one’s own integrity for the integrity of the group, or by acquiring a tolerance for the people we find most difficult – the people who deny us our peace. This could apply to individual vs church; it could apply to individual vs family: and in these post-Christian times, it might even apply to church vs society. Yet it remains true that innocence deserves to be cherished and defended. Mary set out to defend herself and the wonderland she loved. How much better if she’d had help. How much better if she’d had a Church. With spiritual allies, she might have learned something of the peace that is found in the heart of battle. And she would not have made herself a hostage to her own private peace.
[1] Quoted in Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, p. 163. Lawrence was not a Catholic, but was more sympathetic to the Church than might be assumed.
Elegant prose! And effective. I'll be reading this book soon.