At the beginning of the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers, as timid accountant Leo Bloom walks into the office of Broadway producer Max Bialystock, several posters are visible over his shoulder. It is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag, but close inspection reveals that Bialystock’s wall
is covered with posters for real-life Broadway shows he presumably produced, all of them categorical flops. One of them, a sketchily rendered image of a black cat peeping through a few blades of grass, was from the 1966 Broadway production of We Have Always Lived in the Castle: A Melodrama in Three Acts. That the play was based on Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same title, which had spent several weeks on the Times’ bestseller list only four years before, apparently did not translate to Broadway ticket sales. Equally insufficient was the veritable dream team of showbiz legends who worked on the play, all of whom had had or would go on to have enormous success in the industry. The 1966 Broadway production of We Have Always
Lived in the Castle closed after nine performances and has since been largely forgotten by theater fans and Jackson scholars alike.
Out-of-town reviews indicate that the problems with the play were evident even before it ever premiered on Broadway. A critic for the Baltimore Sun diagnosed the issue as a fundamental mismatch of form and content, writing that “[w]hat Miss Jackson, with her distinctive literary gift for evoking horror, can make tenable on the printed page appears as so much nonsense in the theatre” (Gardner). In fact, Jackson herself had misgivings about the project, though her untimely death in the summer of 1965 meant she did not live to see its premiere. In early 1963, she wrote to her parents, in her characteristic uncapitalized style, “there is some great plan afoot to make my book into a broadway play, although no one quite seems to understand it, play producers being the kind of people they are” (Letters 550). Later that year she reported that producer David Merrick had paid her ten thousand dollars for the rights to Castle, though she still expressed concern that she “didn’t know how they could possibly make a play out of [it]” (566). In the same letter, she recounted attending a preview of Robert Wise’s film The Haunting, which had been based on her previous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, dismissing it as, “a very poor movie [with] the plot of the book changed radically, and far too much talk” (565).
If Jackson disapproved of the relatively minor changes Wise had made to Hill House, she would have been horrified at playwright Hugh Wheeler’s treatment of Castle, which is vastly different from her novel in tone, structure, and ending. The inciting tragedy is the same as in the novel: six years before, a few teaspoons of arsenic mysteriously made their way into the sugar bowl, killing most of the wealthy Blackwood family, and leaving only Mary Katherine, her sister Constance, and feeble Uncle Julian alive. As in the novel, Constance takes the blame for the murders, though the culprit is ultimately revealed to have been Merricat. Also remaining from the novel is the sisters’ dapper cousin Charles, whose intrusion into their hermetically sealed world brings about disastrous consequences. The similarities stop there. In the play, Merricat Blackwood is not the stunted eighteen-year-old of the novel, but a fifteen-year-old psychopath inflicting a reign of terror on the house and its remaining inhabitants, who murders her cousin Charles rather than allow his love match with Constance to continue. Gone is the climactic fire which confines the Blackwood girls to the first floor of the house, and the jeering villagers of the novel are transformed into welcoming friends overjoyed to have Constance back among them when, accompanied by her benevolent lover/cousin Charles, she triumphantly, and of her own accord, emerges from the house.
Of all the changes Wheeler made to Jackson’s novel, the most perplexing, and the one I wish to explore here, is his decision to change Merricat’s faithful feline sidekick Jonas into a human child, one who also falls victim to her psychopathic violence. The dramatis personae of the play lists him as “a nine-year-old colored boy,” although the description which accompanies his first lines notes that the character “may also be played by a white boy” (Wheeler 4, 6). This presents us with two questions: why change Jonas to a human child at all? And why specify that he is Black, when the script itself almost immediately qualifies that he need not be? Unless someone discovers a trove of long-lost production notes, we will likely never know for certain Wheeler’s reasons. Nothing in Jackson’s novel, with its all-white cast of characters and quasi-feudal setting, lends itself to this interpretation, nor is Wheeler’s play (at least intentionally) interested in examining the complexities of race. Jonas’s Blackness is purely superficial, grafted onto the body of a child along with all the sociocultural baggage of midcentury white America.
When Let Me Tell You, a posthumous compendium of Jackson’s previously unpublished work appeared in 2015, NPR’s Genevieve Valentine wrote that the book was “an uncanny dollhouse: everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right” (Valentine). The metaphor of the dollhouse is useful in considering Jackson’s body of work; indeed, it was one
she herself often employed to talk about art. But the world of the dollhouse begins and ends at the front porch, and thus its characters exist in a universe which is almost completely divorced from concepts of citizenship and civic engagement. This is the primary reason why race generally does not appear in any of her work, even as she worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most renowned Black political artists of her day. To the best of my knowledge, the only two texts out of Jackson’s entire fiction output to contain references to explicitly Black characters are the short stories “Flower Garden” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” both of which appeared in 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, does feature race in the forms of anti-Asian bias and antisemitism, but even there
Blackness remains conspicuously absent.
Jackson’s fictional worlds, filled as they are with afternoon teas, sprawling estates, and wayward maidens, pull from a cultural lexicon which lends itself almost exclusively to whiteness. Her work is part and parcel of what Richard Dyer called “the US suburban consumerist dream that is in principle multicolored but in practice felt as intrinsically white” (211). While we are never explicitly told the race of Merricat Blackwood, Eleanor Vance, Natalie Waite, or any of Jackson’s other heroines, their middle-class anxieties and gothic heritages make it almost impossible to read them as anything other than white. Evidence of this is abundant in adaptations of Jackson’s work: even as late as 2018, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House featured an all-white principal cast. I contend that at the very least, Wheeler’s odd, flawed play presents an opportunity for a necessary intervention into Jackson studies: that is, when Blackness, even Blackness as clumsily rendered as it is in Wheeler’s play, enters into the universe of Jackson’s fiction, it renders the ubiquitous whiteness of her characters hyper-visible, rather than assuming them as the default. In Wheeler’s adaptation of Castle, the Black, human Jonas serves as a necessary reminder of the world outside the dollhouse.
I do not mean to imply that Wheeler’s play is in any way forward-thinking or commendable for simply including a Black character. His Jonas is largely an impish fringe caricature whose naivete and gluttony recall some of the most sinister stereotypes of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. The human Jonas suffers a violent death which appears nowhere in the novel, as Merricat sacrifices him to appease the vengeful Blackwood ghosts whom she believes protect the house. This is not to suggest that Merricat’s murder of Jonas is in any way racially motivated. In fact, no one on stage ever acknowledges his Blackness, which is communicated only through the stage directions. And yet, even as the acknowledgement of the presence of a Black body remains completely absent from the play, the language of racism and America’s traumatic past creeps in.
Both Merricat and Constance talk of Constance’s having been a “slave” to her dead family members, with Merricat gleefully announcing, “They deserved it. They all deserved to die. Now you will never be their slave again” (Wheeler 66). Perhaps more sinister than the references to slavery is the language of hygiene and purity which pervades the play. To be fair, this has at least some basis in Jackson’s novel, as the Blackwood girls obsessively “neaten” the house, but the Merricat of the play refers to the human Jonas as “filthy,” “bad,” or “dopey” with alarming frequency (6, 7, 15, 35, 57). Wheeler also made the inexplicable choice to represent Constance’s psychological turmoil by having her carry around a bar of Ivory soap. She explains to Charles that she “couldn’t put it down” after the deaths of her family members, insisting that, “It was the only thing that helped. Ivory Soap” (33). Tempted as we may be to dismiss this passing reference, it is hard not to consider it in the context of the brand’s fraught history of playing on unconscious biases in its advertising practices. In her article, “Ivory Soap and American Popular Consciousness: Salvation Through Consumption,” Lisa Lebduska points out that Ivory Soap was initially called simply “White Soap,” and that “[a] mother who purchased White Soap protected her family from the dangers of the dreaded ‘colored soaps’ and provided loved ones with a symbol of gentleness and purity that stood against the perils of illness, poverty, race, and social unrest” (386). In clutching a bar of Ivory Soap, it becomes clear that the domestic purity Constance and Merricat seek to preserve is not only intrinsically female but also intrinsically white.
Because no performance footage exists, it is difficult to determine the extent to which director Garson Kanin highlighted such nuances in the production. However, reviews strongly suggest a performance and subsequent career hemmed in by the boundaries imposed by racism. William Sims, the actor who played Jonas, never appeared on Broadway again, nor did he find a career in film that offered many roles beyond a few appearances in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s (Credits). RH Gardner of The Baltimore Sun found Sims to be “a promising child actor,” but qualified his praise with the admonition that he must, “learn to speak so people in the audience can understand him” (Gardner). Walter Kerr’s scathing New York Times review never mentioned Sims by name, referring to him only as, “the little colored boy who has been adopted from an orphanage” and “that colored lad, who truly means to be cheerful but keeps blabbing things to outsiders” (Kerr).
It is worth highlighting that both reviews mention speech, since “blabbing” is the crime for which the human Jonas of the play eventually pays for with his life. The feline Jonas, of course, has no voice, but as the first-person narrator of the novel, Merricat constantly ascribes human qualities to him, particularly through the verbs used to describe his movements. He “washes” and “bathes” himself rather than grooms, “speaks” rather than meows, and Merricat often uses him to express her own wants and needs, claiming that “Jonas and [she] dislike rhubarb,” much the same way a child might speak through a stuffed animal or an imaginary friend (Jackson, Castle 44). In changing Jonas from a human-like cat into a fully human child, Wheeler raises the stakes for Merricat, who must now control not only her sister, but Jonas as well. She’s aware of this from the very beginning of the play, and thus treats him with a bratty condescension whichappears in their first conversation:
JONAS: Merricat, are you mad with me?
MARY KATHERINE: If I was mad every time you’re bad, I’d be a raving lunatic
with crossed eyes.…
JONAS: (Seeing her take peanut brittle out of a bag, grabbing for it) Oh, peanut
brittle. MARY KATHERINE: (Snatching it from him) It’s not for you. (Wheeler 6)
In denying him food, which is as critical to the Blackwood ecosystem in the play as it is in the novel, Wheeler’s Merricat places Jonas firmly outside the family unit. Even gentle Constance participates in his exclusion, though, again, the text of the play provides no indication whether that exclusion has anything to do with his race. In response to Jonas’s asking if he should go help Merricat pick radishes, Constance replies, “I’d say it’s the least you can do—under the circumstances” and exhorts him not to eat them all on the way back (8). Jonas’s gluttony does have some basis in the novel, as the feline Jonas eats with the family. Merricat tells us, “Constance made sandwiches for Jonas and me, and we ate them in a tree; I sat in a low fork and Jonas sat on a small branch near me, watching for birds” (Jackson, Castle 70). In a novel where being sent to bed without supper is quite literally a matter of life and death, the fact that feline Jonas eats human food underscores his crucial position in the family, as well as Merricat’s determination to maintain it. Not only does the feline Jonas eat human food, but Merricat, who infamously dislikes “dogs” and “washing herself,” insists that he will catch her a mouse for lunch, and later, after the fire, that she “could train [him] to bring back rabbits for stew” (1, 21, 125).
It is a simple enough solution to the problems presented by the girls’ total retreat from the world, but Constance shoots it down immediately, noting that Jonas “is too used to living on cream and rum cakes and buttered eggs” to be much of a hunter (125). In the novel, the feline Jonas is unquestionably a member of the family and serves as Merricat’s constant companion. In the play, we know very little about how the human Jonas came to live with Merricat and Constance, and the scant origin story we do get comes from neighborhood busybody Helen Clarke, who sees the girls once a week for tea. To her friend’s comment that Merricat is a “strange, whimsical child,” Helen responds, “What else would she be—shut up here year after year with no companionship of her own age? Except a little oundling” (Wheeler 18).
She goes on to say that Merricat and Constance took Jonas from “the orphanage” after “it” happened, as “[a] playmate for [Merricat] to take the place of her poor little brother” (Wheeler 18). The human Jonas is thus positioned as an acquisition plucked from a warehouse rather than a human boy with desires and a perspective on his own. Since he was brought to the
house to “take the place” of the murdered brother, he also unwittingly serves as a perpetual reminder of the life Merricat rejected in annihilating her family. As such, Merricat constantly threatens to send him back into the abyss from which he came.
If Helen Clarke is correct, and Jonas came to live with the Blackwoods just after the murders, then he has lived with them since he was three years old and likely cannot remember his life before that. Merricat takes full advantage of this, placing herself in charge of the boy’s education. She seems to regard him as her charge as well as her sidekick, telling Charles, “It’s quite a responsibility having a child. You have to think back to when you were a child yourself and try to make up things to amuse them” (Wheeler 51). She also instills in Jonas the belief in his own inherent depravity, warning him, “Now don’t you be any badder than you are, pussy cat. Or I’ll send you straight back to that evil, wicked orphanage,” and later, after he has accepted a stick of gum from Charles, “I know you. Don’t think I don’t. I know you” (15, 41). When she is not threatening to send him back to the orphanage, she is using the Blackwood ghosts, as well as the looming terror of the outside world, to keep him in line. She returns from her visit to the village full of stories of the taunting children and their “moron” mothers and fathers and tells him with no apparent irony that she hopes “they all turn black inside and rot” (6). She adds that something even worse happened but refuses to tell him what it is because he “blabs so” (7). By establishing Jonas as a “blabber”, Wheeler underscores his potential as a threat to Merricat’s power, one which is only heightened when “the bad thing in the village” is revealed to be Cousin Charles getting off the bus (Wheeler 30).
In the play, Jonas is positioned not as Merricat’s faithful foot soldier in the battle against the demonic Charles, but as a very human boy susceptible to the trinkets of childhood and allure of the outside world Charles brings with him. When it comes to winning the allegiance of a nine-year-old boy, Merricat’s dubious magic and threats of spectral vengeance are not nearly as effective as chewing gum, a football, and tales of Parisians sword fighting with six-foot-long baguettes. Merricat chides him for taking the gum from Charles, insisting that “if you eat anything he gives you, you’re in his power” (Wheeler 41). But the real “magic” of the gum and football and baguettes is that they carry with them the suggestion of the world outside. They are not enchanted, but to a boy who has spent his whole life sequestered among the feminine clutter of the Blackwood house, they might as well be. Indeed, Kerr’s admonition that the play spent too much time “counting props and recounting the past” is an apt one (Kerr). The list of props at the end of the play is painstakingly specific, down to the cracker crumbs on Uncle Julian’s desk and the number of pillows on the settee (Wheeler 75-6). Set designer David Hays, who alone among the creative team was singled out for praise by critics, remembered that director Garson Kanin was “fussy about props,” once forcing the prop master on a different production to buy a series of bananas until one (the 38th in the bunch) was deemed satisfactory (66).
Jackson employed this same precision in her writing, which she detailed in her late-career lecture “Garlic in Fiction.” In it, she lamented the midcentury turn towards the “spare, clean, direct kind of story,” arguing that in removing symbols from their work, writers risked leaving behind “the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of imagination from the everyday account” (Jackson, “Garlic” 398). Though Castle is by far her sparest novel, she described it as written in “a kind of sustained taut style full of images and all kinds [of] double meanings” (qtd. in Franklin 442). The lecture makes clear that Jackson’s theory of symbolism was in fact rooted in the theater, much as an actor “constructs for himself a set of images, or mental pictures, of small, unimportant things he feels belong around the character” (Jackson, “Garlic” 398). She goes on to say, “[t]here must be at least one basic imagine, or set of images, for each character in a story…various things belong to a character…and each of these must take on, like a perfume, the essence of the character they belong to” (398). In the novel, the feline Jonas has no “garlic” but is himself one of the many symbols clustered around Merricat. Like the talismans buried beneath the ground, he is part of the bulwark meant to hold “steady against the world (Jackson, Castle 1). In the play, Jonas is transformed from one of Merricat’s enchanted objects to a living, speaking person with garlic of his own, playing with his football in the house and “smashing all the pretty things” (Wheeler 44). Moreover, not only does he express an interest in the outside world, but he also regards himself as a critical part of the one he is confined to.
JONAS: We’re very rich. We have millions of dollars in the safe. If we wanted to, we could fly to Paris tomorrow, couldn’t we, Constance?
MARY KATHERINE: Constance doesn’t want to go to Paris, dopey. Do you,
Constance?
CONSTANCE: Oh, well, who knows? Everything seems possible at a time like this. (Wheeler 48)
His use of the pronoun “we” indicates that he certainly intends to reap some of the benefits of being a Blackwood. But the moment passes quickly, as the safe which preoccupies the Charles of the novel matters not at all in the play. Far from being the scheming gold-digger of Jackson’s novel, this Charles wants only to reignite his childhood romance with his cousin Constance. Perhaps he is meant to serve at the voice of the audience, as he rebuts his cousins’ insular fantasy world with a diatribe that might be aimed at any one of Jackson’s isolated heroines: “That’s what you need—an excuse to shirk any kind of living or loving. The whole world’s against you, out to get you—the enemy. There’s no such thing as a decent person with a decent motive” (Wheeler 55). In addition to rebuking Constance’s paranoia and agoraphobia, Charles sees Jonas playing with his football and offhandedly comments that he may one day “make All American,” making clear that the changes he brings to the Blackwood house will not stop with Constance (Wheeler 44). This is later confirmed when Jonas asks Charles to help him leave the house, begging, “I want to see Paris. I want to see everywhere in the world. What’s a castle? Who wants a crumby old castle when you can’t even go to the Keep Out fence?” (Wheeler 51). Jonas’s rejection of the “crumby old castle” is, of course, a rejection and betrayal of Merricat and the world she has created, and the punishment must be death.
On its face, the ritual murder of a child should be right at home in Jackson’s work. This is, after all, the woman whose most famous work features a town’s beloved tradition of choosing a resident to stone to death. Dara Downey contends that Castle in particular among Jackson’s work exhibits ritualistic and quasi-religious themes, as Merricat and Constance obsessively construct and maintain their home as a “shrine to privacy” (189). She goes on to point out that in the novel, “the fire and its aftermath allow the sisters to harness the power of ritual defilement, rendering the place more sacred…primarily because what the villagers have not succeeded in doing is depriving them of privacy” (191). The girls’ insistence on privacy barely appears in the play; theater is, after all, the most public of artforms. Like the fire, which is completely absent from the play, Jonas’s murder marks the point of no return for Merricat and the world she has created. It takes place immediately after Charles takes Constance from the house, where the family ghosts cannot protect her, which Merricat insists is a direct result of Jonas’s betrayal. Contrite and terrified, Jonas offers to sacrifice his football to placate the ghosts. Merricat agrees but says he must do so in the attic, as his “expiation.” Having agreed to do so, Jonas climbs into the dumbwaiter.
JONAS: Merricat, I’m so sorry. I love Constance so much — almost as much as I love you. If what I did broke the spell…
MARY KATHERINE: (Patting his head) Dopey. Just remember it’s something really precious. They’ll help Constance then—and keep her safe— even in the village…
JONAS: Bye, Merricat.
MARY KATHERINE: Goodbye, dopey kitty cat. (Wheeler 57)
Of course, the predictable happens. Merricat cuts the dumbwaiter rope, sending Jonas to his death, and then throws couch pillows down the shaft until he stops moaning. Wheeler makes clear in this moment that Merricat believes completely in the ghosts and magic, lest we suspect she has killed Jonas out of racial bias or a desire for revenge. Her calling him “kitty cat” in the moment of his death is clearly a reference to the novel but also draws attention to another curious disparity: no cats appear anywhere in the play. So why did the poster for the Broadway production prominently feature one? The most likely explanation is that producer David Merrick, hoping to capitalize on the novel’s popularity, simply reappropriated the first edition’s cover art. Indeed, Paul Bacon’s design is simple but effective, featuring a black cat, presumably Jonas, sitting among tall blades of grass
It is possible that Hugh Wheeler, in need of a speaking Jonas, made the crude decision to simply change the coat color of the cat to the skin color of the child. But the text of the novel provides no explicit indication that Jonas is a black cat. In fact, despite his omnipresence and the careful attention Jackson pays to his physicality, she never bothers to tell us what color he is at all. Still, the black cat has come to stand as an emblem of Castle, appearing on the covers of at least seven other editions (Temple). As an amateur historian of witchcraft, Jackson would surely have been familiar with the work of English anthropologist Margaret Alice Murray, who wrote extensively on historical representations of the occult. In her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray described the domestic familiar as “a small animal fed in a special manner on bread and milk and blood…used for working magic on the persons and property of other people” (209). The feline Jonas, who gluts himself on Constance’s rum cakes and follows Merricat around the property, is clearly intended to serve as her metaphorical familiar, with Ruth Franklin writing that he “enhances [her] witchiness” (499).
Indeed, the black cat has come to serve as a symbol of Jackson’s body of work as a whole. Her first author biography described her as, “an authority on witchcraft and magic…passionately addicted to cats, [currently having] six, all coal black…” (qtd. in Temple). She named at least one of these cats Shax, the name of the king of all demons (Franklin 188). It likely did not escape her notice that the name contained a clever blending of “Shirley” and “Jackson,” a verbal trick which appears again as Mary Katherine Blackwood becomes Merricat, the black cat. Additionally, the feline Jonas provides Merricat with the level of devotion she wants from her sister: unquestioning loyalty, entertainment, and a complete inability to speak for himself. But in the play, by killing the human Jonas, Merricat reaffirms his status as a commodity to be exchanged: he’s brought to the Blackwood house as a playmate for her, and then done away with when he has outlived his usefulness (Wheeler 63).
No one involved with the Broadway production of We Have Always Lived in the Castle left detailed accounts of their time working on the play. Most, including William Sims, who played Jonas, have died in recent years. Aside from a script, scathing reviews, and a few production photos, the play seems fated to remain among the most obscure adaptation of Jackson’s work.
But in his decision to incorporate Blackness into the world of Castle, Wheeler unwittingly provided a blueprint, flawed as it is, for interpretations of Jackson’s work in which whiteness is called into question, rather than presented as a ubiquitous inevitability. If we are going to Blacken the canon (and we should), exploring the political and social implications of Wheeler’s
misguided endeavor provides us with as good a place as any to start.
Works Cited
Credits. “William Sims.” imdb: The Internet Movie Database,
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0801391/, accessed 20 Jan. 2024.
Downey, Dara. “‘Reading Her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology,” It Came from the 1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, ed. Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy & Bernice Murphy, Springer, 2011, p 176-197.
Dyer, Richard. White, Routledge, 1997.
Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Liveright, 2016.
Gardner, RH. “Melodrama by Shirley Jackson”. The Baltimore Sun, 2 Oct. 1966, p. D12.
Hays, David. Setting the Stage: What We Do, How We Do It, and Why, Wesleyan UP, 2006.
Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. Penguin Books, 2006.
---. “Garlic in Fiction,” Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays and Other Writings, ed. Laurenc Jackson Hyman, & Sarah Hyman Dewitt, Penguin Random House, 2015, p 395-406.
Kerr, Walter. “Theater: ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’; Wheeler Play Staged by Garson Kanin Shirley Knight and Alan Webb at Barrymore,” The New York Times, 20 Oct. 1966, p. 53.
Lebduska, Lisa. “Ivory Soap and American Popular Consciousness: Salvation Through Consumption,” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 48, no. 2, April 2015, p. 385-98.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson, ed. by Laurence Jackson Hyman, Random House, p 202.
Murray, Margaret Alice. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology, Oxford UP, p 192.
Temple, Emily. “Please enjoy these 25 spooky, cat-heavy covers of We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” Literary Hub, 21 Sept. 2020. https://lithub.com/please-enjoy-these-25-spooky-cat-heavy-covers-of-we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle
---. “Shirley Jackson: Possibly a Witch, Definitely Played the Zither,” Literary Hub, 8 Aug. 2018. https://lithub.com/shirley-jackson-possibly-a-witch-definitely-played-the-zither/
Wheeler, Hugh. We Have Always Lived in the Castle: A Melodrama in Three Acts, Dramatists Play Service, 1967.
Valentine, Genevieve. “Shirley Jackson Gets to the Heart of the Home in Let Me Tell You,” NPR, 23 Jul. 2015. https://www.ctpublic.org/2015-07-23/shirley-jackson-gets-to-the-heart-of-the-home-in-let-me-tell-you
At the beginning of the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers, as timid accountant Leo Bloom walks into the office of Broadway producer Max Bialystock, several posters are visible over his shoulder. It is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag, but close inspection reveals that Bialystock’s wall
is covered with posters for real-life Broadway shows he presumably produced, all of them categorical flops. One of them, a sketchily rendered image of a black cat peeping through a few blades of grass, was from the 1966 Broadway production of We Have Always Lived in the Castle: A Melodrama in Three Acts. That the play was based on Shirley Jackson’s novel of the
same title, which had spent several weeks on the Times’ bestseller list only four years before, apparently did not translate to Broadway ticket sales. Equally insufficient was the veritable dream team of showbiz legends who worked on the play, all of whom had had or would go on to have enormous success in the industry. The 1966 Broadway production of We Have Always
Lived in the Castle closed after nine performances and has since been largely forgotten by theater fans and Jackson scholars alike.
Out-of-town reviews indicate that the problems with the play were evident even before it ever premiered on Broadway. A critic for the Baltimore Sun diagnosed the issue as a fundamental mismatch of form and content, writing that “[w]hat Miss Jackson, with her distinctive literary gift for evoking horror, can make tenable on the printed page appears as so much nonsense in the
theatre” (Gardner). In fact, Jackson herself had misgivings about the project, though her untimely death in the summer of 1965 meant she did not live to see its premiere. In early 1963, she wrote to her parents, in her characteristic uncapitalized style, “there is some great plan afoot to make my book into a broadway play, although no one quite seems to understand it, play producers
being the kind of people they are” (Letters 550). Later that year she reported that producer David Merrick had paid her ten thousand dollars for the rights to Castle, though she still expressed concern that she “didn’t know how they could possibly make a play out of [it]” (566). In the same letter, she recounted attending a preview of Robert Wise’s film The Haunting, which had been based on her previous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, dismissing it as, “a very poor movie [with] the plot of the book changed radically, and far too much talk” (565).
If Jackson disapproved of the relatively minor changes Wise had made to Hill House, she would have been horrified at playwright Hugh Wheeler’s treatment of Castle, which is vastly different from her novel in tone, structure, and ending. The inciting tragedy is the same as in the novel: six years before, a few teaspoons of arsenic mysteriously made their way into the sugar bowl, killing most of the wealthy Blackwood family, and leaving only Mary Katherine, her sister Constance, and feeble Uncle Julian alive. As in the novel, Constance takes the blame for the murders, though the culprit is ultimately revealed to have been Merricat. Also remaining from the novel is
the sisters’ dapper cousin Charles, whose intrusion into their hermetically sealed world brings about disastrous consequences. The similarities stop there. In the play, Merricat Blackwood is not the stunted eighteen-year-old of the novel, but a fifteen-year-old psychopath inflicting a reign of terror on the house and its remaining inhabitants, who murders her cousin Charles rather than allow his love match with Constance to continue. Gone is the climactic fire which confines the Blackwood girls to the first floor of the house, and the jeering villagers of the novel are transformed into welcoming friends overjoyed to have Constance back among them when, accompanied by her benevolent lover/cousin Charles, she triumphantly, and of her own accord,
emerges from the house.
Of all the changes Wheeler made to Jackson’s novel, the most perplexing, and the one I wish to explore here, is his decision to change Merricat’s faithful feline sidekick Jonas into a human child, one who also falls victim to her psychopathic violence. The dramatis personae of the play lists him as “a nine-year-old colored boy,” although the description which accompanies his first
lines notes that the character “may also be played by a white boy” (Wheeler 4, 6). This presents us with two questions: why change Jonas to a human child at all? And why specify that he is Black, when the script itself almost immediately qualifies that he need not be? Unless someone discovers a trove of long-lost production notes, we will likely never know for certain Wheeler’s
reasons. Nothing in Jackson’s novel, with its all-white cast of characters and quasi-feudal setting, lends itself to this interpretation, nor is Wheeler’s play (at least intentionally) interested in examining the complexities of race. Jonas’s Blackness is purely superficial, grafted onto the body of a child along with all the sociocultural baggage of midcentury white America.
When Let Me Tell You, a posthumous compendium of Jackson’s previously unpublished work appeared in 2015, NPR’s Genevieve Valentine wrote that the book was “an uncanny dollhouse: everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right” (Valentine). The metaphor of the dollhouse is useful in considering Jackson’s body of work; indeed, it was one
she herself often employed to talk about art. But the world of the dollhouse begins and ends at the front porch, and thus its characters exist in a universe which is almost completely divorced from concepts of citizenship and civic engagement. This is the primary reason why race generally does not appear in any of her work, even as she worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most renowned Black political artists of her day. To the best of my knowledge, the only two texts out of Jackson’s entire fiction output to contain references to explicitly Black characters are the short stories “Flower Garden” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” both of which appeared in 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, does feature race in the forms of anti-Asian bias and antisemitism, but even there
Blackness remains conspicuously absent.
Jackson’s fictional worlds, filled as they are with afternoon teas, sprawling estates, and wayward maidens, pull from a cultural lexicon which lends itself almost exclusively to whiteness. Her work is part and parcel of what Richard Dyer called “the US suburban consumerist dream that is in principle multicolored but in practice felt as intrinsically white” (211). While we are never explicitly told the race of Merricat Blackwood, Eleanor Vance, Natalie Waite, or any of Jackson’s other heroines, their middle-class anxieties and gothic heritages make it almost impossible to read them as anything other than white. Evidence of this is abundant in adaptations of Jackson’s work: even as late as 2018, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House featured an all
white principal cast. I contend that at the very least, Wheeler’s odd, flawed play presents an opportunity for a necessary intervention into Jackson studies: that is, when Blackness, even Blackness as clumsily rendered as it is in Wheeler’s play, enters into the universe of Jackson’s fiction, it renders the ubiquitous whiteness of her characters hyper-visible, rather than assuming
them as the default. In Wheeler’s adaptation of Castle, the Black, human Jonas serves as a necessary reminder of the world outside the dollhouse.
I do not mean to imply that Wheeler’s play is in any way forward-thinking or commendable for simply including a Black character. His Jonas is largely an impish fringe caricature whose naivete and gluttony recall some of the most sinister stereotypes of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. The human Jonas suffers a violent death which appears nowhere in the novel, as Merricat sacrifices him to appease the vengeful Blackwood ghosts whom she believes protect the house. This is not to suggest that Merricat’s murder of Jonas is in any way racially motivated. In fact, no one on stage ever acknowledges his Blackness, which is communicated only through the stage directions. And yet, even as the acknowledgement of the presence of a Black body remains completely absent from the play, the language of racism and America’s traumatic past creeps in.
Both Merricat and Constance talk of Constance’s having been a “slave” to her dead family members, with Merricat gleefully announcing, “They deserved it. They all deserved to die. Now you will never be their slave again” (Wheeler 66). Perhaps more sinister than the references to slavery is the language of hygiene and purity which pervades the play. To be fair, this has at least some basis in Jackson’s novel, as the Blackwood girls obsessively “neaten” the house, but the Merricat of the play refers to the human Jonas as “filthy,” “bad,” or “dopey” with alarming frequency (6, 7, 15, 35, 57). Wheeler also made the inexplicable choice to represent Constance’s psychological turmoil by having her carry around a bar of Ivory soap. She explains to Charles that she “couldn’t put it down” after the deaths of her family members, insisting that, “It was the only thing that helped. Ivory Soap” (33). Tempted as we may be to dismiss this passing reference, it is hard not to consider it in the context of the brand’s fraught history of playing on unconscious biases in its advertising practices. In her article, “Ivory Soap and American Popular Consciousness: Salvation Through Consumption,” Lisa Lebduska points out that Ivory Soap was initially called simply “White Soap,” and that “[a] mother who purchased White Soap protected her family from the dangers of the dreaded ‘colored soaps’ and provided loved ones with a symbol of gentleness and purity that stood against the perils of illness, poverty, race, and social unrest” (386). In clutching a bar of Ivory Soap, it becomes clear that the domestic purity Constance and Merricat seek to preserve is not only intrinsically female but also intrinsically white.
Because no performance footage exists, it is difficult to determine the extent to which director Garson Kanin highlighted such nuances in the production. However, reviews strongly suggest a performance and subsequent career hemmed in by the boundaries imposed by racism. William Sims, the actor who played Jonas, never appeared on Broadway again, nor did he find a career in film that offered many roles beyond a few appearances in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s (Credits). RH Gardner of The Baltimore Sun found Sims to be “a promising child actor,” but qualified his praise with the admonition that he must, “learn to speak so people in the audience can understand him” (Gardner). Walter Kerr’s scathing New York Times review never mentioned Sims by name, referring to him only as, “the little colored boy who has been adopted from an orphanage” and “that colored lad, who truly means to be cheerful but keeps blabbing things to outsiders” (Kerr).
It is worth highlighting that both reviews mention speech, since “blabbing” is the crime for which the human Jonas of the play eventually pays for with his life. The feline Jonas, of course, has no voice, but as the first-person narrator of the novel, Merricat constantly ascribes human qualities to him, particularly through the verbs used to describe his movements. He “washes” and “bathes” himself rather than grooms, “speaks” rather than meows, and Merricat often uses him to express her own wants and needs, claiming that “Jonas and [she] dislike rhubarb,” much the same way a child might speak through a stuffed animal or an imaginary friend (Jackson, Castle 44). In changing Jonas from a human-like cat into a fully human child, Wheeler raises the stakes for Merricat, who must now control not only her sister, but Jonas as well. She’s aware of this from the very beginning of the play, and thus treats him with a bratty condescension whichappears in their first conversation:
JONAS: Merricat, are you mad with me?
MARY KATHERINE: If I was mad every time you’re bad, I’d be a raving lunatic
with crossed eyes.…
JONAS: (Seeing her take peanut brittle out of a bag, grabbing for it) Oh, peanut
brittle. MARY KATHERINE: (Snatching it from him) It’s not for you. (Wheeler 6)
In denying him food, which is as critical to the Blackwood ecosystem in the play as it is in the novel, Wheeler’s Merricat places Jonas firmly outside the family unit. Even gentle Constance participates in his exclusion, though, again, the text of the play provides no indication whether that exclusion has anything to do with his race. In response to Jonas’s asking if he should go help Merricat pick radishes, Constance replies, “I’d say it’s the least you can do—under the circumstances” and exhorts him not to eat them all on the way back (8). Jonas’s gluttony does have some basis in the novel, as the feline Jonas eats with the family. Merricat tells us, “Constance made sandwiches for Jonas and me, and we ate them in a tree; I sat in a low fork and Jonas sat on a small branch near me, watching for birds” (Jackson, Castle 70). In a novel where being sent to bed without supper is quite literally a matter of life and death, the fact that feline Jonas eats human food underscores his crucial position in the family, as well as Merricat’s determination to maintain it. Not only does the feline Jonas eat human food, but Merricat, who infamously dislikes “dogs” and “washing herself,” insists that he will catch her a mouse for lunch, and later, after the fire, that she “could train [him] to bring back rabbits for stew” (1, 21, 125).
It is a simple enough solution to the problems presented by the girls’ total retreat from the world, but Constance shoots it down immediately, noting that Jonas “is too used to living on cream and rum cakes and buttered eggs” to be much of a hunter (125). In the novel, the feline Jonas is unquestionably a member of the family and serves as Merricat’s constant companion. In the play, we know very little about how the human Jonas came to live with Merricat and Constance, and the scant origin story we do get comes from neighborhood busybody Helen Clarke, who sees the girls once a week for tea. To her friend’s comment that Merricat is a “strange, whimsical child,” Helen responds, “What else would she be—shut up here year after year with no companionship of her own age? Except a little oundling” (Wheeler 18).
She goes on to say that Merricat and Constance took Jonas from “the orphanage” after “it” happened, as “[a] playmate for [Merricat] to take the place of her poor little brother” (Wheeler 18). The human Jonas is thus positioned as an acquisition plucked from a warehouse rather than a human boy with desires and a perspective on his own. Since he was brought to the
house to “take the place” of the murdered brother, he also unwittingly serves as a perpetual reminder of the life Merricat rejected in annihilating her family. As such, Merricat constantly threatens to send him back into the abyss from which he came.
If Helen Clarke is correct, and Jonas came to live with the Blackwoods just after the murders, then he has lived with them since he was three years old and likely cannot remember his life before that. Merricat takes full advantage of this, placing herself in charge of the boy’s education. She seems to regard him as her charge as well as her sidekick, telling Charles, “It’s quite a responsibility having a child. You have to think back to when you were a child yourself and try to make up things to amuse them” (Wheeler 51). She also instills in Jonas the belief in his own inherent depravity, warning him, “Now don’t you be any badder than you are, pussy cat. Or I’ll send you straight back to that evil, wicked orphanage,” and later, after he has accepted a stick of gum from Charles, “I know you. Don’t think I don’t. I know you” (15, 41). When she is not threatening to send him back to the orphanage, she is using the Blackwood ghosts, as well as the looming terror of the outside world, to keep him in line. She returns from her visit to the village full of stories of the taunting children and their “moron” mothers and fathers and tells him with no apparent irony that she hopes “they all turn black inside and rot” (6). She adds that something even worse happened but refuses to tell him what it is because he “blabs so” (7). By establishing Jonas as a “blabber”, Wheeler underscores his potential as a threat to Merricat’s power, one which is only heightened when “the bad thing in the village” is revealed to be Cousin Charles getting off the bus (Wheeler 30).
In the play, Jonas is positioned not as Merricat’s faithful foot soldier in the battle against the demonic Charles, but as a very human boy susceptible to the trinkets of childhood and allure of the outside world Charles brings with him. When it comes to winning the allegiance of a nine-year-old boy, Merricat’s dubious magic and threats of spectral vengeance are not nearly as
effective as chewing gum, a football, and tales of Parisians sword fighting with six-foot-long baguettes. Merricat chides him for taking the gum from Charles, insisting that “if you eat anything he gives you, you’re in his power” (Wheeler 41). But the real “magic” of the gum and football and baguettes is that they carry with them the suggestion of the world outside. They are not enchanted, but to a boy who has spent his whole life sequestered among the feminine clutter of the Blackwood house, they might as well be. Indeed, Kerr’s admonition that the play spent too much time “counting props and recounting the past” is an apt one (Kerr). The list of props at the end of the play is painstakingly specific, down to the cracker crumbs on Uncle Julian’s desk and the number of pillows on the settee (Wheeler 75-6). Set designer David Hays, who alone among the creative team was singled out for praise by critics, remembered that director Garson Kanin was “fussy about props,” once forcing the prop master on a different production to buy a series of bananas until one (the 38th in the bunch) was deemed satisfactory (66).
Jackson employed this same precision in her writing, which she detailed in her late-career lecture “Garlic in Fiction.” In it, she lamented the midcentury turn towards the “spare, clean, direct kind of story,” arguing that in removing symbols from their work, writers risked leaving behind “the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of imagination from the everyday account” (Jackson, “Garlic” 398). Though Castle is by far her sparest novel, she described it as written in “a kind of sustained taut style full of images and all kinds [of] double meanings” (qtd. in Franklin 442). The lecture makes clear that Jackson’s theory of symbolism was in fact rooted in the theater, much as an actor “constructs for himself a set of images, or mental pictures, of small, unimportant things he feels belong around the character” (Jackson, “Garlic” 398). She goes on to say, “[t]here must be at least one basic imagine, or set of images, for each character in a story…various things belong to a character…and each of these must take on, like a perfume, the essence of the character they belong to” (398). In the novel, the feline Jonas has no “garlic” but is himself one of the many symbols clustered around Merricat. Like the talismans buried beneath the ground, he is part of the bulwark meant to hold “steady against the world (Jackson, Castle 1). In the play, Jonas is transformed from one of Merricat’s enchanted objects to a living, speaking person with garlic of his own, playing with his football in the house and “smashing all the pretty things” (Wheeler 44). Moreover, not only does he express an interest in the outside world, but he also regards himself as a critical part of the one he is confined to.
JONAS: We’re very rich. We have millions of dollars in the safe. If we wanted to, we could fly to Paris tomorrow, couldn’t we, Constance?
MARY KATHERINE: Constance doesn’t want to go to Paris, dopey. Do you,
Constance?
CONSTANCE: Oh, well, who knows? Everything seems possible at a time like this. (Wheeler 48)
His use of the pronoun “we” indicates that he certainly intends to reap some of the benefits of being a Blackwood. But the moment passes quickly, as the safe which preoccupies the Charles of the novel matters not at all in the play. Far from being the scheming gold-digger of Jackson’s novel, this Charles wants only to reignite his childhood romance with his cousin Constance. Perhaps he is meant to serve at the voice of the audience, as he rebuts his cousins’ insular fantasy world with a diatribe that might be aimed at any one of Jackson’s isolated heroines: “That’s what you need—an excuse to shirk any kind of living or loving. The whole world’s against you, out to get you—the enemy. There’s no such thing as a decent person with a decent motive” (Wheeler 55). In addition to rebuking Constance’s paranoia and agoraphobia, Charles sees Jonas playing with his football and offhandedly comments that he may one day “make All American,” making clear that the changes he brings to the Blackwood house will not stop with Constance (Wheeler 44). This is later confirmed when Jonas asks Charles to help him leave the house, begging, “I want to see Paris. I want to see everywhere in the world. What’s a castle? Who wants a crumby old castle when you can’t even go to the Keep Out fence?” (Wheeler 51). Jonas’s rejection of the “crumby old castle” is, of course, a rejection and betrayal of Merricat and the world she has created, and the punishment must be death.
On its face, the ritual murder of a child should be right at home in Jackson’s work. This is, after all, the woman whose most famous work features a town’s beloved tradition of choosing a resident to stone to death. Dara Downey contends that Castle in particular among Jackson’s work exhibits ritualistic and quasi-religious themes, as Merricat and Constance obsessively construct and maintain their home as a “shrine to privacy” (189). She goes on to point out that in the novel, “the fire and its aftermath allow the sisters to harness the power of ritual defilement, rendering the place more sacred…primarily because what the villagers have not succeeded in doing is depriving them of privacy” (191). The girls’ insistence on privacy barely appears in the play; theater is, after all, the most public of artforms. Like the fire, which is completely absent from the play, Jonas’s murder marks the point of no return for Merricat and the world she has created. It takes place immediately after Charles takes Constance from the house, where the family ghosts cannot protect her, which Merricat insists is a direct result of Jonas’s betrayal. Contrite and terrified, Jonas offers to sacrifice his football to placate the ghosts. Merricat agrees but says he must do so in the attic, as his “expiation.” Having agreed to do so, Jonas climbs into the dumbwaiter.
JONAS: Merricat, I’m so sorry. I love Constance so much — almost as much as I love you. If what I did broke the spell…
MARY KATHERINE: (Patting his head) Dopey. Just remember it’s something really precious. They’ll help Constance then—and keep her safe— even in the village…
JONAS: Bye, Merricat.
MARY KATHERINE: Goodbye, dopey kitty cat. (Wheeler 57)
Of course, the predictable happens. Merricat cuts the dumbwaiter rope, sending Jonas to his death, and then throws couch pillows down the shaft until he stops moaning. Wheeler makes clear in this moment that Merricat believes completely in the ghosts and magic, lest we suspect she has killed Jonas out of racial bias or a desire for revenge. Her calling him “kitty cat” in the moment of his death is clearly a reference to the novel but also draws attention to another curious disparity: no cats appear anywhere in the play. So why did the poster for the Broadway production prominently feature one? The most likely explanation is that producer David Merrick, hoping to capitalize on the novel’s popularity, simply reappropriated the first edition’s cover art. Indeed, Paul Bacon’s design is simple but effective, featuring a black cat, presumably Jonas, sitting among tall blades of grass.
It is possible that Hugh Wheeler, in need of a speaking Jonas, made the crude decision to simply change the coat color of the cat to the skin color of the child. But the text of the novel provides no explicit indication that Jonas is a black cat. In fact, despite his omnipresence and the careful attention Jackson pays to his physicality, she never bothers to tell us what color he is at all. Still, the black cat has come to stand as an emblem of Castle, appearing on the covers of at least seven other editions (Temple). As an amateur historian of witchcraft, Jackson would surely have been familiar with the work of English anthropologist Margaret Alice Murray, who wrote extensively on historical representations of the occult. In her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray described the domestic familiar as “a small animal fed in a special manner on bread and milk and blood…used for working magic on the persons and property of other people” (209). The feline Jonas, who gluts himself on Constance’s rum cakes and follows Merricat around the property, is clearly intended to serve as her metaphorical familiar, with Ruth Franklin writing that he “enhances [her] witchiness” (499).
Indeed, the black cat has come to serve as a symbol of Jackson’s body of work as a whole. Her first author biography described her as, “an authority on witchcraft and magic…passionately addicted to cats, [currently having] six, all coal black…” (qtd. in Temple). She named at least one of these cats Shax, the name of the king of all demons (Franklin 188). It likely did not escape her notice that the name contained a clever blending of “Shirley” and “Jackson,” a verbal trick which appears again as Mary Katherine Blackwood becomes Merricat, the black cat. Additionally, the feline Jonas provides Merricat with the level of devotion she wants from her sister: unquestioning loyalty, entertainment, and a complete inability to speak for himself. But in the play, by killing the human Jonas, Merricat reaffirms his status as a commodity to be exchanged: he’s brought to the Blackwood house as a playmate for her, and then done away with when he has outlived his usefulness (Wheeler 63).
