In Rough Country (6 page)

O
f the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers's
The Member of the Wedding
(1946) and Scout of Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March's
The Bad Seed
(1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar
(1963)—none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old “Merricat” of Shirley Jackson's masterpiece of Gothic suspense
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(1962). At once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer, Merricat addresses the reader as an intimate:

Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but only to recounting them. One might expect
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
to be a confession, of a kind—after all, one or another of the Blackwood sisters poisoned their entire family, six years before—but Merricat has nothing to confess, still less to regret;
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
is a romance with an improbable—magical—happy ending. As readers we are led to smile at Merricat's childish self-definition, as one who dislikes “washing myself” it will be many pages before we come to realize the significance of
Amanita phalloides
and the wish to have been born a werewolf. In this deftly orchestrated opening, Merricat's wholly sympathetic creator/collaborator Shirley Jackson has struck every essential note of her Gothic tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance; as it unfolds in ways both inevitable and unexpected,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a “happy ending” is both ironic and
literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others.

Like other, similarly isolated and estranged hyper-sensitive young-female protagonists of Shirley Jackson's fiction—Natalie of
Hangsaman
(1951), Elizabeth of
The Bird's Nest
(1954), Eleanor of
The Haunting of Hill House
(1959)—Merricat is socially maladroit, highly self-conscious and disdainful of others. She is “special”—her witchery appears to be self-invented, an expression of desperation and a yearning to stop time with no connection to satanic practices, still less to Satan. (Merricat is too willful a witch to align herself with a putative higher power, especially a masculine power.) Her voice is sharp, funny, compelling—and teasing. For more than one hundred pages Merricat taunts us with what she knows, and we don't know; her recounting of the tragic Blackwood family history is piecemeal, as in the tangled back-story there is an echo of Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw
—that masterwork of unreliable narration in which we are intimate witnesses to a naively repressed young woman's voyeuristic experience of sexual transgression and “exquisite pathos.” Like the innocent pubescent-girl-protagonists of
The Member of the Wedding
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Merricat Blackwood appears to be a typical product of small town rural America—much of her time is spent outdoors, alone with her companion cat Jonas; she's a tomboy who wanders in the woods, unwashed and her hair uncombed; she's distrustful of adults, and of authority; despite being uneducated, she is shrewdly intelligent, and bookish. At times Merricat behaves
as if mildly retarded, but only outwardly; inwardly, she's razor-sharp in her observations, and hyper-alert to threats to her well-being. (Like any damaged person Merricat most fears change in the unvarying rituals of her household.) A mysterious amalgam of the childlike and the treacherous, Merricat is “domesticated” by only one person, her older sister Constance.

There is a lovely lyricism to her observations when she's alone, and out-of-doors:

Even in this pastoral setting Merricat is brought back forcibly to the prejudices of her upbringing: the Blackwoods' contempt for others.

If Merricat is mad, it's a “poetic” madness like the madness of the young heroine of
The Bird's Nest
, whose subdued personality harbors several selves, or the madness celebrated by Emily Dickinson—“Much Madness is divinest Sense—/To a discerning Eye—/Much sense—the starkest Madness—'Tis the Majority” [435]. Her condition suggests paranoid schizophrenia in which anything out of the ordinary is likely to be threatening and all things are signs and symbols to be deciphered—“All the omens spoke of change.” Merricat is determined to deflect “change”—the threat to her household—through witchcraft, a kind of simple, sympathetic magic involving “safeguards”: “the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods; as long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us.” Merricat—surely like her creator—is one for whom words are highly potent, as well:

By degrees we learn that there are many household tasks that Merricat isn't allowed to do, like help in the preparation of food or handle knives. Minor frustrations have a violent effect upon her: “I could not breathe; I was tied with wire, and my head was huge and going to explode…I had to content myself with smashing the milk pitcher which waited on the table; it had been our mother's, and I left the pieces on the floor so that Constance would see them.” It's ironic that Merricat's aristocratic disdain of other people derives from her identification with her rich New England family—now nearly extinct—whom she seems to have hated violently when they were alive. It may have been her parents' disciplining of her that precipitated the family tragedy when, as Uncle Julian reminisces, Merricat was “a great child of twelve, sent to bed without her supper.”

In the novel's opening, suspenseful chapter, Merricat must make her way from the Blackwood manor house at the edge of the village into town, as the intermediary between the remaining Blackwoods and the outer world: “Fridays and Tuesdays were terrible days, because I had to go into the village. Someone had to go to the library, and the grocery; Constance never went past her own garden, and Uncle Julian could not.” Here is no Grover's Corners as in Thornton Wilder's sentimental classic of small town America,
Our Town
: this is a New En gland town of “dirty little houses on the main highway”—a place of unmitigated “ugliness” and “rot” where dwell individuals poised to “come at [Merricat] like a flock of taloned hawks—birds descending, striking, gashing with razor claws.” Hostility
toward the Blackwoods seems to have predated the Blackwood poisoning scandal:

Merricat's fantasies are childish, alarmingly sadistic: “I am walking on their bodies.”—“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”—“I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries…stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves.” Such unmitigated hatred, out of all proportion to any source within
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, suggests a savage Swiftian indignation that passes beyond social satire of the kind written by Jackson's older contemporaries Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, into the realm of psychopathological caricature. (Jackson's difficulties with her fellow citizens in North Bennington, Vermont, are well documented in Judy Oppenheimer's harrowing biography
Private Demons
, 1988: the suggestion is that Jackson and her husband, the flamboyant “Jewish-intellectual” cultural critic Stanley Edgar Hyman
aroused resentment, if not outright anti-Semitism, in their more conventional Christian neighbors.) The animosity of the villagers for the Blackwoods suggests the priggish racism of Jackson's subtly modulated short story “Flower Garden”—in which a newcomer to a New England village unwisely befriends a resident black man—and the barbaric behavior of the villagers of Jackson's most famous story “The Lottery” in which a yearly ritual of scapegoating and stoning to death is enacted by lottery. Here, in a place said to closely resemble the North Bennington of Shirley Jackson's day, a dirge-like tune of unknown origin prevails from generation to generation, unquestioned by the brainless local citizenry:

In
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, a jeering chant follows in Merricat's wake when she ventures into town:

In the village, life is crude, cruel, noisy and ugly; in the Blackwood manor house, life is quiet, sequestered, governed by the daily custom and ritual of mealtimes, above all inward—“Almost all of our life was lived toward the back of the house, or the lawn and the garden where no one else ever came…The rooms we used together were the back ones.” The Blackwood house isn't haunted in quite the way that Hill House is haunted (“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely un
der conditions of absolute reality. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within…”), but its former, now deceased inhabitants emerge in portentous times, in Merricat's sleep, calling her name—to warn her? To torment her? By degrees we discover the secret of the Blackwood house—the poisonings, by arsenic, six years before, of the entire family except Constance, then twenty-two years old, Merricat, then twelve, and their Uncle Julian. Constance, who'd prepared the meal that day, and took care to wash out the sugar bowl before police arrived, was accused of the poisonings, tried and acquitted, for lack of sufficient evidence; Merricat was sent away for the duration of the trial, then brought back to live with Constance and her uncle in their diminished household. (Julian, who has never recovered from the trauma of being poisoned, persists in believing that Merricat died in the “orphanage”—despite the fact that he and his niece inhabit the same house.) Merricat's uncle is preoccupied with writing up his account of the poisonings:

Why no one seems to suspect—as the reader does, immediately—that the unstable Merricat, not the amiable Constance, is the poisoner is one of the curiosities of the novel, as it's a
mystery why Constance is so indulgent of Merricat, who contributes nothing to the household. Certainly there's little subterfuge in Merricat's teasing of others, in alluding to various kinds of poisons; her tormenting of her cousin Charles contains a transparent threat:

Constance's mild reproach: “Silly Merricat.”