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white_hartBefore reading it, my impression of We Have Always Lived In The Castle was of a cross between I Capture The Castle and the Addams Family, and actually I don't think I was all that far off. As well as titular references to castles, both it and I Capture The Castle have female first-person narrators in their late teens, girls on the verge of adulthood, perhaps a bit consciously naive, and relationships between sisters are at their hearts, while the isolated Blackwood house and the shunned, eccentric family within are certainly examples of the same American Gothic tradition as the Addams Family.
It's a short book, but there's a lot in it. The story of Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood and her sister Constance, who live alone apart from their disabled uncle, isolated from their community following the deaths of the rest of their family in a notorious mass poisoning which Constance was accused and acquitted of, it's often extremely creepy and quite disturbing, exploring themes of madness and bullying and how society reacts to difference (I think if the novel had been written now rather than fifty years ago Merricat would almost certainly be considered neurodivergent) in a similar way to classics of feminist literature such as The Yellow Wallpaper and Wide Sargasso Sea. And yet it's also utterly charming, and not actually an unhappy book at all.
It's a short book, but there's a lot in it. The story of Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood and her sister Constance, who live alone apart from their disabled uncle, isolated from their community following the deaths of the rest of their family in a notorious mass poisoning which Constance was accused and acquitted of, it's often extremely creepy and quite disturbing, exploring themes of madness and bullying and how society reacts to difference (I think if the novel had been written now rather than fifty years ago Merricat would almost certainly be considered neurodivergent) in a similar way to classics of feminist literature such as The Yellow Wallpaper and Wide Sargasso Sea. And yet it's also utterly charming, and not actually an unhappy book at all.
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Date: 2016-09-01 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-01 06:55 pm (UTC)