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x_losWe Have Always Lived In The Castle
Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a really amazing book (don’t be put off by the uninspiring film, "The Haunting"). I read it on my own in high school, and again for Latham’s awesome ‘the Gothic Novel and its Adaptations’ course. I hadn’t read much else of hers, however, because I thought of her as largely a short story writer. Though I objectively recognize the form can do great things, I agree with Cynthia Ozzick’s introduction to her collection Bloodshed’s breakdown of short-stories as either
1) complete, closed circuits, or
2) fragments which comprise a successful narrative, but which are drawn from a larger universe (i.e. the characters have obvious full lives and existences outside of these events—the story exists in a world larger than the story itself),
and I tend to appreciate the latter more than the former. And really that’s a mark of my novelistic drive as a reader and writer—I generally prefer a novel’s prolonged exploration of characters and plots, and tend to avoid short stories because they so often seem competent, but not engaging or endearing.
I saw We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a coffee table book in Richmond’s Tea Box and was startled to realize she had other novels—I’d never seen any, browsing in Iowa City and Columbia’s used bookstores.
Like Hardy, Jackson is big on evocative environmental description. The Blackwood ‘Castle,’ its surrounding forest and the village beyond are, like her Hill House, fully realized, dense, smotheringly sensual. You cannot escape forming not only pictures, but whole floor plans, even if, like me, you are not naturally a terribly visually-minded reader.
The rhythm of the prose is off-putting in its strangeness, but catching—very quickly you’re swept into it, like a strong current, and you begin to think in the books’ patterns.
It is perhaps the most intriguing portrait of agoraphobia I’ve ever encountered. The language of food and home (despite and because of its disruption in the huge multiple murder) and the domestic witchcraft describe and encapsulate the world that will come to embody Merricat’s dream of ‘living on the moon.’ In almost engagement with the idea of hysteria, or of young men as the actors in the outer, rational world, super-governed by social notions of sanity, there’s a continuum between madness and femininity here—and between the strength conferred by both. Uncle Julian, Constance and Merricat are removed from the exterior world—exiles, outcasts and fugitives.
Merricat’s system of magical thinking is at once primitive and canny. Her alien, bewildering intelligence forces an unsentimental empathy. And it’s not ineffective—Cousin Charles is banished by her rites, even if he cannot be kept away with them. By the end of the book, she is the witch who captures Rapunzel and keeps her from all mens’ eyes. She is the witch with the gingerbread house children are warned not to touch. They are goddesses, brought offerings of food, and her cat is a part of her name. Jonas is her familiar and her totem, putting Marricat (and Constance, the Vesta of the piece, ever tending the fire, ever loyal and homey*) in a context with Bastet or Freyja or their earthy witch descendents. Constance and Merricat are Weird Sisters, too intimate a duo to admit a third and comprise the traditional trio. It is haunting and otherworldly, frightening, transcendent, common-place and glorious as a fairy tale should be.
I find the Joyce Carol Oates essay afterwards really unsatisfying. It's at once prosaic and kind of ham-fisted. I thought it would help me think about this kind of complex, delicate book-experience, but it's sort of like a big heavy guy tramping through your garden and smooshing shit. I don't like it, for the book's sake, and it makes me wonder if I'm wrong in my reading—but I don't think I am? I think my reading is fine, and hers too... dogmatic? Too prone to over-simplification, too political. It sort of Mentions interesting things without probing the Whys at all. This is not a novel ABOUT lesbianism in ANY sense, but if Oates caught at the paranoid anti-male elements, then she should have teased those out and explored them, rather than essentially said THIS IS A LESBIAN NOVEL, LIKE JACKSON’S OTHER LESBIAN NOVELS, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE’S LESBIAN NOVELS. AND THERE'S SOME INCEST.
It's not the Graveyard Book. There's /not/ 'some incest.' The relationship is complex and contradictory, creepy and interesting. I wanted an essay that helped me think about it, not an essay that didn't get it.
At this point J-Co (as the rappers call her) is just the Girl Who Cried Lesbiansex.
* Also it's interesting to note that Merricat refers to an unbreakable continuity of Blackwood Women ('the Blackwood Women have always'), and of Constance as the inheritor of these traditions, while she herself--never womanly in any sexual sense--is always divorced from them.
Jackson’s novels are below: I’d love to read the ones I haven’t/hear opinions on them!
The Road Through the Wall (1948)
Hangsaman (1951)
The Bird's Nest (1954)
The Sundial (1958)
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a really amazing book (don’t be put off by the uninspiring film, "The Haunting"). I read it on my own in high school, and again for Latham’s awesome ‘the Gothic Novel and its Adaptations’ course. I hadn’t read much else of hers, however, because I thought of her as largely a short story writer. Though I objectively recognize the form can do great things, I agree with Cynthia Ozzick’s introduction to her collection Bloodshed’s breakdown of short-stories as either
1) complete, closed circuits, or
2) fragments which comprise a successful narrative, but which are drawn from a larger universe (i.e. the characters have obvious full lives and existences outside of these events—the story exists in a world larger than the story itself),
and I tend to appreciate the latter more than the former. And really that’s a mark of my novelistic drive as a reader and writer—I generally prefer a novel’s prolonged exploration of characters and plots, and tend to avoid short stories because they so often seem competent, but not engaging or endearing.
I saw We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a coffee table book in Richmond’s Tea Box and was startled to realize she had other novels—I’d never seen any, browsing in Iowa City and Columbia’s used bookstores.
Like Hardy, Jackson is big on evocative environmental description. The Blackwood ‘Castle,’ its surrounding forest and the village beyond are, like her Hill House, fully realized, dense, smotheringly sensual. You cannot escape forming not only pictures, but whole floor plans, even if, like me, you are not naturally a terribly visually-minded reader.
The rhythm of the prose is off-putting in its strangeness, but catching—very quickly you’re swept into it, like a strong current, and you begin to think in the books’ patterns.
It is perhaps the most intriguing portrait of agoraphobia I’ve ever encountered. The language of food and home (despite and because of its disruption in the huge multiple murder) and the domestic witchcraft describe and encapsulate the world that will come to embody Merricat’s dream of ‘living on the moon.’ In almost engagement with the idea of hysteria, or of young men as the actors in the outer, rational world, super-governed by social notions of sanity, there’s a continuum between madness and femininity here—and between the strength conferred by both. Uncle Julian, Constance and Merricat are removed from the exterior world—exiles, outcasts and fugitives.
Merricat’s system of magical thinking is at once primitive and canny. Her alien, bewildering intelligence forces an unsentimental empathy. And it’s not ineffective—Cousin Charles is banished by her rites, even if he cannot be kept away with them. By the end of the book, she is the witch who captures Rapunzel and keeps her from all mens’ eyes. She is the witch with the gingerbread house children are warned not to touch. They are goddesses, brought offerings of food, and her cat is a part of her name. Jonas is her familiar and her totem, putting Marricat (and Constance, the Vesta of the piece, ever tending the fire, ever loyal and homey*) in a context with Bastet or Freyja or their earthy witch descendents. Constance and Merricat are Weird Sisters, too intimate a duo to admit a third and comprise the traditional trio. It is haunting and otherworldly, frightening, transcendent, common-place and glorious as a fairy tale should be.
I find the Joyce Carol Oates essay afterwards really unsatisfying. It's at once prosaic and kind of ham-fisted. I thought it would help me think about this kind of complex, delicate book-experience, but it's sort of like a big heavy guy tramping through your garden and smooshing shit. I don't like it, for the book's sake, and it makes me wonder if I'm wrong in my reading—but I don't think I am? I think my reading is fine, and hers too... dogmatic? Too prone to over-simplification, too political. It sort of Mentions interesting things without probing the Whys at all. This is not a novel ABOUT lesbianism in ANY sense, but if Oates caught at the paranoid anti-male elements, then she should have teased those out and explored them, rather than essentially said THIS IS A LESBIAN NOVEL, LIKE JACKSON’S OTHER LESBIAN NOVELS, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE’S LESBIAN NOVELS. AND THERE'S SOME INCEST.
It's not the Graveyard Book. There's /not/ 'some incest.' The relationship is complex and contradictory, creepy and interesting. I wanted an essay that helped me think about it, not an essay that didn't get it.
At this point J-Co (as the rappers call her) is just the Girl Who Cried Lesbiansex.
* Also it's interesting to note that Merricat refers to an unbreakable continuity of Blackwood Women ('the Blackwood Women have always'), and of Constance as the inheritor of these traditions, while she herself--never womanly in any sexual sense--is always divorced from them.
Jackson’s novels are below: I’d love to read the ones I haven’t/hear opinions on them!
The Road Through the Wall (1948)
Hangsaman (1951)
The Bird's Nest (1954)
The Sundial (1958)
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
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