(De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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• (De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Amy LeBlanc (bio) and Leah Van Dyk (bio)

While Shirley Jackson’s novels often use gothic elements (including omens, large and stately houses, a supernatural presence, and horror), We Have Always Lived in the Castle differs from other texts in Jackson’s body of work: the last completed novel before her death in 1965, it is one of few works with a first-person protagonist, Merricat Blackwood, who subverts gothic tropes by being less victim than victimizer.¹ From Merricat’s first appearance, we learn of her fondness for the death-cap mushroom,² a highly toxic fungus that is responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings each year: she explains, “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, . . . I like my sister Constance . . . and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”³ From the very beginning, Merricat embodies the intersections of gothic and natural imagination, equating her sinister love of poisonous mushrooms to the maintenance of her quiet, sheltered life with Constance.

In Castle, the ecogothic arises through spectral environments, eco-sickness, vengeful natures (both human and more-than-human), and uncanny bodies and spaces. Using ecocritical theorists such as Helen Houser and Sarah Jaquette Ray alongside gothic criticism of Jackson, we seek to explore the interconnections and importance of the ecogothic in Castle, examining how eco-sickness narratives “carry us from the micro-scale of the individual to the macro-scale of institutions, nations, and the planet” and paying close attention to the use of fungus in the novel as a metaphor for—and simultaneous agent against—these places, structures, and bodies.⁴ While the role of the gothic in Jackson’s work is frequently examined, it is Castle’s grounding in the environmental as gothic that makes it a unique study in Jackson’s oeuvre. Jackson’s environmental influences allow [End Page 121] for new frameworks through which to read places, structures, and bodies as being gothic in and of themselves. The liminal space of Merricat and Constance’s isolated home and garden, and the transgressions and interconnections of this natural space in their lives, insist on an ecogothic reading of this short yet complex text.

In using fungi as the focal point of our discussion, supported by considerations of plants and nature more generally, we seek to make explicit the importance of the environment to the Blackwood sisters’ usurpation of the gothic space and transgression of gothic literary expectations. As Helen Houser writes, we investigate and distinguish how “in ecosickness [or ecogothic] fiction, humans and the more-than-human world do not only interact but, more importantly, are coconstitutive.”⁵ The invasions of the natural world (particularly the fungal and plant worlds) in Castle cause not only disruption to the gothic genre but disintegration of the expectations of gothic protagonists, gender roles, and sickly spaces. In their article on fungal transformations in fin de siècle literature, Anthony Camara writes that fungus “joins the ranks of literary monstrosities” because it presents an “extreme morphological plasticity”⁶ that taps into our anxieties about the unknown, the unclassifiable, and the dangerous. In Jackson’s work in particular, fungus is an effective emblem of gothic literature—with its roots in the earth and its decay-filled growth—as, through Merricat’s affinity for Amanita phalloides, Castle (de)composes the expectations and anxieties of the gothic.

Shirley Jackson and Castle’s Gothic Origins

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916 and spent most of her adult life in New York and then Vermont with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman; their four children; and numerous cats.⁷ Jackson is best known for her works of horror, psychological tension, literary suspense, and domestic comedy, including such famed works as “The Lottery,” Hangsaman, and The Haunting of Hill House.⁸ Between Jackson’s own work, numerous biographies (including Ruth Franklin’s A Rather Haunted Life), and the publication of Jackson’s collected letters (edited by her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman), we meet a writer who could horrify her readers while also making...