Preserving Gothics

Article by Lisa Schindler 10c (Published 28.01.2024)

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women. Each year Constance and Uncle Julian and I had jam or preserve or pickel that Constance had made, but we never touched what belonged to the others; Constance said it would kill us if we ate it. 

Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (1962) is a true masterpiece of gothic suspense. The reader is immediately intimately addressed by the main protagonist Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood. Her first-person narration becomes an equally haunting as fascinating experience that leaves a psychedelic thrill in the reader. 

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” is a story of Sisterhood, of aristocracy and most importantly of how symbolism is the vice of horror. Shirley Jackson most skillfully performs this, by her stellar use of objects and materialistic good in her 1962 novel. 

Most strikingly, the Blackwood women’s preserves leave the immediate narrative situation, and become a meditation on the Blackwood family’s fatal flaw. 

Immortality has been portrayed throughout literature as hubris and has rarely led characters anywhere other than death or eternal doom. But Constance and her sister Merricat, are simply the last remaining members of their family. Apart from their Uncle Julian who is essential, but gives nothing immense to the plot. 

The women in the Blackwood family have preserved foods for centuries. Food plays a significant role in the novel, being almost fetishized by Merricats sadistic ouvertures, oftentime featuring poisonings. Therefore the preserves that are so lovingly kept by the sisters become the most essential of Shirley’s symbolisms. 

Shirley Jackson manages to expertly create a true work of gothic horror that leaves the reader haunted with eerie prose. To do this without having explicit scenes of gore and violence is an achievement in itself.

However, it also causes oneself to question how this novel can be as wonderfully haunting as it is, without outright being so. 

The symbolism invoked by Shirley through, for example, the preserves is one of the most thrilling portrayals of gothic brilliance one will find in 20th century stories. 

The preserves become a symbol of longevity, outliving generations, outliving the rot that Merricat so ardently wishes upon her village. 

They perform everything that the Blackwood family can not perform themselves. For it is obvious that the Blackwood’s live to materialistically imprint their existence, rather than flaunting it lavishly on the remainder of society. Preferring to show their significance through matriarchal memory, in the form of preserves. 

This contains the essential thrill of reading Shirley’s work, the way it haunts you without outright horror is sure to embed itself in one's mind for a long time.

Sources: 

Jackson, S. (1962). We Have Always Lived in the Castle. State University of New York Press.