Review by k_aro - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

k_aro 's review for:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

4.5

adventurous dark funny fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is actually a lot like Midsommar, with the ending simultaneously the final relief and skin-crawling.

Dani escapes into a pastoral Scandinavian fantasy, never having to confront the rest of the implications, yet seeing the bear burn is the audience's catharsis too; Mary and Constance escape into their decaying inherited wealth, yet the "offerings" (as this edition's afterword puts it) are fulfillment for the reader.

I think you can tell Shirley Jackson is a short story writer, not in any bad way: her focus is very clear and singular, in a way that a constrained story only has so many pages to tell it. However, it also means that (like in the way a novel-writer might) she can't pontificate on things that aren't directly about the central theme.

Some things I thought were poignant/good/fun:

Charles comes to replace Mary as the 'male' role (shopping, deciding how Uncle Julian is treated, making the aesthetic feeling of the house)—in connection, Charles wearing their father's jewelry and Mary supposing that Constance might start wearing their mother's pearls (incest!)
When Mary goes to the 'summerhouse' and starts acting out what she would want her parents/family to act like ('Bow down to Mary Katherine!') and then finding out later that
she's the one that poisoned the sugar, in fact.
The fact that the townspeople bring offerings after they're (in the visual field) 'dead'; maybe they did kind of need the Blackwoods, in the way they didn't need the Clarkes, because at least there was someone you could justifiably point and laugh at
Constance suggesting the driveway be called "Lover's Lane" and then saying "The least Charles could have done... was shoot himself through the head in the driveway". Both a Midsommar parallel and (again) the sublimated incest.

Content Warnings