Analysis Of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle

According to Elizabeth Lowell, “Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.” Sometimes what every situation needs is an outsider to flip the script and create a new outlook on everything. In Shirley Jackson’s novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” the speaker, Merricat, is an outsider of society on many levels, such as mental health, gender, and that she is an upper class citizen in a poor area. Although Merricat is mentally unstable, her outsider’s perspective criticizes the social standard for women in the 1960s, indicating that social roles, marriage, and the patriarchy are not necessary aspects in life such as it is not necessary to have the same outlook on life as others.

Eternal youth can seem close to perfect, but eventually everyone has to grow up and be mature. For example, In the Glass Castle Jeannette walls had to grow up young, and quickly realized the world does not wait for you.

“Don’t call me Grandma. Name’s Erma.” (Walls, 131). This is the first thing Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, hears out of her grandmother Erma’s mouth when they go to stay at her home in Welch, West Virginia. The Walls family has come across hard times and they need somewhere to live. “She don't like it none ‘cause it makes her sound old.” This was the response of Grandpa Ted, Erma’s husband, a more even tempered and gentle man. Does this make Erma an upper social class woman concerned of appearing less beautiful? Or a hardworking woman torn down by poverty who doesn’t want to feel less able than she was when she was younger.

In Jeannette Walls’ autobiography, The Glass Castle, when she describes her siblings’ lives since she, Lori, and Brian left their parents to head to New York City, she brings to light Maureen’s lasting struggles to make something of her life, “Meanwhile, Maureen had graduated from high school and enrolled in one of the city colleges, but she never really applied herself and ended up living with Mom and Dad. The longer she stayed with Mom and Dad, the more lost she became; Six months later, Maureen stabbed Mom,” (2 As Jeannette takes the readers through an overview of her siblings’

In the Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls an impoverished girl writes in her memoir portraying her deeply dysfunctional family and coming of age. Throughout the novel she puts in her perspective and utilization of rhetorical devices including a nonchalant and optimistic tone, symbols, themes, and a story structure. Jeannette specifically creates settings of her memories with imagery. As her family is always “skedaddling” the new “homes” are set to display their struggle and current situation. This imagery allows the reader to sympathize.

Alexander Popes famous saying goes "To err is human, to forgive is divine" (Line 525). Everyone makes a mistake every once in a while, everybody sins on way or another, and in the end almost all of them seek forgiveness. The very nature of people is to get upset and feel resentful towards those who have done some harm to them in any way. Humans tend to remember the undesirable actions that others inflict upon them. Forgiveness is overcoming the feeling of resentment towards the person who has done wrong to us. In the novel "The Glass Castle" by Jeanette Walls, Jeanette is constantly forgiving her parents for their unsuitable choices; choices that often leave them impoverished, emaciated, and in abhorrent conditions. Jeanette proves that even

Edgar Allen Poe, a master of suspense, wrote stories over a hundred and fifty years ago that remain popular today. One of Poe’s suspense techniques in these short stories are unreliable characters. An unreliable character is a character, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The unreliable narrator forces the reader to ask questions like, “Is this true?” rather than “Who did it?” or “What happened?” Poe uses unreliable characters in many of his stories very effectively to keep the reader guessing what is ultimately true. Three of his most famous stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death”. He illustrated how effective such narration is.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle is a novel written by Shirley Jackson, a popular and influential American writer of the 20th century. The narrative revolves around two sisters, Mary Katherine and Constance, who live together with their amnesic and out-of-touch Uncle Julian in their opulent, ancestral home. The sisters’ parents and brother, as well as Uncle Julian’s wife are dead, all killed by arsenic put into the sugar bowl one night at dinner. Constance, who cooked the meal, was acquitted for the crime but was still held suspect by the village while strangely enough, Mary Katherine had been sent to her room without dinner that night as a punishment and therefore was never questioned. Despite this tragedy, they seem to live happy, stagnant lives until their distant cousin Charles shows up desiring the family’s wealth and bringing radical change. The novel is played out through the consciousness of the younger sister Mary Katherine or “Merricat,” who has wild fantasies and modes of processing the world around her, inserting the reader into her demented imagination. Shirley Jackson employs fairytale and witchcraft into the story through imagery and symbolism presented by Merricat in order to convey the psychoanalytic effects of ignorance and isolation.

This paper will analyze and interpret the relationship between the murderous child and their protector in both stories, The Bad Seed and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

She uses Mrs. Hutchinson and the mob to show the cruelty of people and how they will attack someone who is alone, “Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and they were on her,” (). Another story that Jackson uses the bullying and harassment from children is in We Have Always Lived in a Castle. After the Blackwoods house burns down and the villagers do not help them instead they make the situation worse for Connie and Merricat. “A wall of laughter rose and grew behind him and then, first the boys on the steps and then the other men and at last the women and the smaller children, they moved like a wave at our house,” the villagers raided the burned house and surrounded the girls jeering and taunting them(). Through these stories, Jackson portrays the message that life is unfair, that she learned quickly at a young age

       As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist.  Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be.  She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170).  However, in a time

In Alice Munro’s “Silence”, Juliet, a single working mother, is abandoned by her daughter Penelope, who left without a warning or a trace to explore her spirituality and start a new life for herself. Juliet is at first baffled and distraught, as she cannot understand why Penelope would leave. She had thought that Penelope had always been very happy at home. Juliet never does hear definitively why Penelope left, but throughout this short story she analyzes why it might be and what it means for her life now. The use of simple and straightforward diction, emotional monologues, and harsh conclusions show a drastic case of how children can grow apart from their parents. These techniques align with Poe’s theory that a story should evoke a unique

From the first lines and throughout the entire novel, monstrosity is widely encountered in Shirley Jackson’s final book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Monstrosity sparks human curiosity as it is out of the ordinary, vicious and captivating. In the novel, the theme is presented from an original angle and is noticeable under many aspects, including Merricat’s complex character and the conflict opposing the Blackwood family to the villagers.

In the novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” there are many extremely important themes, such as domesticity. This novel focuses heavily on domesticity because it portrays characters who are highly devoted to their home. In this novel, Constance Blackwood, Mary Katherine Blackwood, and Julian Blackwood are three of the only Blackwood’s which are still alive. However, the cause of death of the rest of the Blackwood’s causes many of the townspeople to hate Constance and Mary Katherine Blackwood especially. Although very hated in the village, the two girls and their uncle Julian remain in

Edgar Allen Poe’s tale of murder and revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado”, offers a unique perspective into the mind of a deranged murderer. The effectiveness of the story is largely due to its first person point of view, which allows the reader a deeper involvement into the thoughts and motivations of the protagonist, Montresor. The first person narration results in an unbalanced viewpoint on the central conflict of the story, man versus man, because the reader knows very little about the thoughts of the antagonist, Fortunato. The setting of “The Cask of Amontillado”, in the dark catacombs of Montresor’s wine cellar, contributes to the story’s theme that some people will go