Striga Tenebricosa @beldamsblog - Tumblr Blog

any time someone pollutes known gothic lesbian feminist codependent utopia book tag We Have Always Lived In The Castle with sebastian stan thirst gifs, an angel dies

tragbarerpanzrabwehrkomplexfagot

girlvasectomy

gnomebutch

Men make fun of prominent women readers because a lot of them are into YA smut or whatever and it’s not like I’m above also making fun of that group but if you read any famous novel written by a man there’s a considerately large chance that sexual violence will be an aspect and that explicit descriptions of female characters is inevitable, even in more classical literature, but that’s males writing it and it doesn’t make women happy so it’s fine I guess

Read We Always Lived in The Castle and now I'm kinda lost and drifting

Such a good book, it was a while since one touched me this way

copperarsenite

Merricat's moon is the moon of the Marseilles Tarot: an enchanted counterpoint to the day world of the village, but also a stagnant landscape where time has stopped or maybe even gone backwards and the only light is a reflected light where the villagers' malice shines back at them. Are we in a goddess-ruled kingdom of magic and the unconscious? Or a prison of fear and superstition? At novel's end, the paradox is serenely held: again and again the sisters proclaim themselves to be happy, with the quiet conviction of Meursault at the end of Camus's L'Etranger as he goes up to the gallows, and the reader has no reason to doubt them.

— Donna Tartt from the Afterward of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle

fromthemouthofkings

mmm Constance and Merricat are buried in a moulding tomb but also they're safe in their house on the moon. Constance is trapped but also complicit. Merricat is her jailer but also her protector. time has stopped but is also running out. their life has changed, and they are free from the threat of change. the pretentions of their old life have burned away, a new life is never coming. they never need to let anyone in ever again. they'll get sick or hurt or need help, eventually. they lost everything, and they won. they're grieving, and they're happy.

brightbeautifulthings

"All cat stories start with the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this.'"

— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

batrachised

my favorite part of We Have Always Lived In the Castle is that moment partway through the book when someone asks about Merricat, and Uncle Julian huffs and says Merricat has been dead for years - because when I first read it, I had a split second beat of shock like wait, really? even though I'm sure it was logically impossible by that point in the novel, Merricat is written in such an eerie way I almost immediately accepted she could be a ghost (she definitely haunts the castle!), but then you blink and are like wait, no, she's very much alive. it has a way of really driving Merricat in

a-drifting-boat

In Merricat's creepy fantasy about her family worshipping her, one thing I noticed is the emphasis she places on being loved. And to her there's clearly a strong connection between "we love you" and "you must never be punished;" to Merricat, punishment or disapproval equals a lack of love. It's left ambiguous whether this is a result of egotism or whether she was a genuinely unloved child. I kind of lean towards the latter based on the very dismissive and uncaring way Uncle Julian talks about her supposed death and the hints that her brother was favoured over her.

And it's also interesting that they're not saying they won't punish her no matter what she does. They're saying that they won't punish her because she would never do anything to warrant punishment. She's not just concerned with avoiding punishment, she also doesn't want to deserve it.

I'm wondering whether Merricat undergoing frequent punishments as a child influenced her obsession with rules and rituals as an adult. She frequently says that she's "not allowed" to do things, and by the end it's heavily implied that these are self-imposed rules rather than ones enforced by Constance. And obviously a lot of the "not allowed" things relate to the murder of her family - preparing food, entering Uncle Julian's room, handling knives, etc - she's imposing certain strictures on herself to make sure she doesn't do the same thing to Julian or Constance. But also -

Her family punished her, she was always in disgrace, she's a murderer, the villagers hate her, she can't integrate into adult society or behave the way someone of her age is expected to. She's unable to adhere to the external codes of behaviour created by the people around her. By their standards she is at first a bad child who deserves punishment, and then someone who has committed a horrific crime. But she wants to feel like someone who would never allow herself to do anything wrong. So she develops her own code of behaviour, one that she can adhere to, one that is alien to everyone else in the world.

She creates rules for herself that she has to obey, she gives herself certain duties (protecting the house, being kind to Uncle Julian.) She can't be good and not deserving of punishment by the standards of her parents or the villagers or wider society - so she invents her own standards, by which she can. And she is narratively rewarded for living up to her own standards, I think - she chases away Charles, she stays in the house, she retains control of Constance, she gets everything she wants.