“Not only did the angry villagers hound their monster to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches.”
― Susan Stryker1
Decades of scholarship on Jackson’s Gothic fiction has generally focused on the frustration of her women characters, confined in patriarchal households, as a presumptively female-gendered phenomenon, almost as a matter of course. Angela Hague, for instance, insists that “[b]y focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting identities… Jackson displays in pathological terms the position of many women in the 1950s” (74). Such readings aren’t incorrect in the least: female containment and female mental illness are indisputably the two most frequent tropes in Jackson’s fiction.
Nevertheless, strictly female-gendered analysis of Jackson’s work also encounters limits, because her fiction is keenly attuned to the possibility of existence beyond gender altogether. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962, hereafter Castle) reveals this limitation quite explicitly, working hard to dismantle the category of “women” itself. In the novel, the two Blackwood sisters, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance, live with their debilitated uncle, Julian; all three survived a mass murder six years prior caused by no one other than Merricat herself. The plot focuses on how the two sisters manage life on a fancy, fenced-in family estate in a town that treats them coldly. Merricat, in particular, serves as the focus of the novel’s character-system as she comes into conflict with both the townspeople and her (undeniably patriarchal) Cousin Charles.
Merricat is certainly a feminist agent, but she is neither merely a feminist agent, nor an unambiguously female-gendered one. I read her as a non-binary genderqueer character occupying a queer space in queer temporality—and in particular, precisely the kind of “monstrous queer” (84) coined by the theorist Dallas J. Baker. Reading Castle closely reveals not just a rebellion against patriarchy, but a series of notably queer performances through which she aims to free herself from her identity as a human girl, under which she was subjected to the disciplinary order of the patriarchy surrounding her. This rebellion also takes the form of a rejection of cisgendered, heterosexual time and its rhythms, depicting a queer temporality of exactly the sort famously described by Jack Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005). Merricat manages temporality to realize queer temporality after asserting power over the household by poisoning most of its members. Bit by bit, she transforms the environment around her into a queer space, eradicating the signs and remnants of patriarchy from the Blackwood house and thereby transforming it into a defiant, deviant refuge from patriarchal order and time. When the arrival of her cousin Charles threatens to undermine that time and space, however, she must figure out how to re-establish them against the “straightening” influence of her rival for power over time itself.
Put another way: in hindsight through the experiences of the near past, we can now see what would have been difficult for a reader in Jackson’s time to articulate—that Merricat redesigns her home as a queer space, accommodating queer subjects, both usurping and parodying the twentieth-century family-enforcing ideology of financial stability under heteronormativity. Jackson’s vibrant imagination, well ahead of its era, stealthily built a community unbounded not just by patriarchy but also by presumptions of heterosexuality and cisgender identity—an offbeat version which might still well offer us counsel in the twenty-first century, as we ponder with urgency what forms and practice might replace the vision of straight, cis individuals under a father’s leadership that continues to attempt to suppress its rivals.
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Though Castle is less well-known than more frequently mentioned and adapted works like “The Lottery” (1948) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the way it envisions an expansive gender identity for Merricat, as well as prospects for queer community building, are both distinctive and important. However, few critics have noticed the way Merricat subverts and questions femininity; instead they have interpreted Merricat straightforwardly as a woman (in essence and by nature) fighting against patriarchal oppression. For instance, Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson evaluate her as “an outsider, like many of Jackson’s women, but [one who] maintains an imaginative spirit and a fierce devotion to defending her sister and her home” (167). Ruth Franklin writes that Castle, “in its final version, is not about ‘two women murdering a man.’ It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves” (442). The ways in which Merricat declines to conform to norms of gender are always attributed to rebellion against patriarchy, but the refusal to accept norms of femininity goes under-addressed. The analysis of the relationship between the two sisters, in particular, as female bonding runs throughout the scholarship on this text.
Other scholars repeat the same feminizing tendency by reading Merricat autobiographically. Jackson’s unstable relationship with her own mother, Geraldine, has been documented carefully, and the temptation to refer all mothers in her fiction back to her life has dominated much discourse on Jackson. Esther Muñoz-González, for instance, focuses on the mother-daughter relationship as seen through Jackson’s own life, contending that the mother in Castle is not a traditional mother, but rather embodies the law of the father—which is why “Merricat rebels against Mrs. Blackwood as well” (84) by murdering her entire family. Muñoz-González builds this analysis atop the image created throughout critic Darryl Hattenhauer’s work of Geraldine Jackson as an instance of what Jane Gallop called “the phallic mother” (qtd. in Hattenhauer 7), which has tended to dominate subsequent readings of Jackson’s fiction. Similarly, on Franklin’s account, “Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood,” and “[a]ll the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).
It is true that Jackson’s mother Geraldine constantly expressed her dissatisfaction with her daughter for not conforming to the image of a pretty, “decent” housewife. But reading Merricat as a female character whose identity has been shaped solely through her relationship to her mother also risks reductionism, for two reasons. Not only does it read art as unrefracted life, but it attributes the uniqueness of a female character to the influence, passively received, of her fatherlike mother. This assumption colors readings of other key aspects of Castle, as well. Angela Hague reads Merricat as a girl “obsessed with locked doors and the fence that encircles the property” and who “attempt[s] to reconstitute their former domestic arrangements among the ruins of their former estate” [with her sister after the fire] (85). Charles does successfully enter the Blackwood household, where he influences Constance with his patriarchal worldview; and Merricat does indeed try to protect the household goods handed down from her father from Charles. However, reading Castle as a novel in which the female protagonist fundamentally tries to protect property passed down from the patriarch overlooks Merricat’s desire for a not-very-patriarchal, notably queered, creation of new social forms outside her domestic environment. The biographical reading veils just how far Merricat steps toward life outside heteropatriarchal society. By the end of Castle, Merricat doesn’t just valorize the binary that assigns women to an inferior social position, nor does she simply valorize the feminine half of the binary. Rather, she turns the patriarchal system into a blank slate, upon which she writes a new, queered order of life in queer time in order to better serve herself and her remaining family.
When viewed with an openness to queer perspectives, Merricat’s identity can encompass both that of the feminist subject fighting against at once patriarchal oppression, and that of a genderqueer subject. The concept of “genderqueerness,” an umbrella term that includes genders which cannot be categorized either as male or female, first began to arise during the third-wave feminism of the 1990s, roughly thirty years after the publication of Jackson’s Castle. Some critics might allege that a genderqueer reading is anachronistic, but that charge would overlook the fact that, from the very start, the idea of the “genderqueer” aimed to cover retrospectively all gender-variant experiences and identities. Colin Haines, for instance, describes what kind of effect queerness and queering deliberately aims to bring to the understanding of counter-normative gender and sexual identities:
queer questions the efficacy of ‘identity’ to ‘liberate.’ Indeed, once identity is understood as an effect of ideology, how can identity liberate from the very ideology that produces and requires its maintenance? Queer focuses on those bodies, and bodily practices that expose the sutures in the system, and that disrupt its totalizing claims. This may be … those bodies wherein anatomy and identity collide (transgendered/-sexual), or those bodies whose practices transgress the trajectory of heterosexual desire (lesbian, gay, bisexual). (25)
Haines’ definition of queer pointedly mentions identities not conforming to the bodies of man and woman, accepted in cis-heteronormative society, stressing that the concept of genderqueerness tries to transcend the binary opposition of gender identities. Gender identities such as non-binary, genderless, gender-fluid, and numerous others may fall under the rubric of “genderqueer”; however, the term is intended to include any gender identities outside the binary gender system.
I read Merricat as a genderqueer subject whose gender identity cannot be affirmed as “one hundred percent female” but who also comes to command the masculine power that used to be held by the patriarch—a case in which, as Haines says, Merricat becomes one of “those bodies wherein anatomy and identity collide.” Identifying Merricat as genderqueer frees the character from the bridle of not only patriarchy but also a straightforwardly binarized “femininity,” avoiding the simple path of ascribing to this character an antipatriarchal but essentialist subjectivity.
On top of this understanding of Merricat as a genderqueer character, Baker’s concept of the “monstrous queer” is especially appropriate. Baker originally applied this term to describe entities in fairy tales that are “‘eccentric and disruptive’ and [which] act against the protagonist and heteronormative trajectory by threatening ‘wife, children, home, and phallus’” (84). Monstrous queers in fairytales violate the boundaries between what is considered normal and abnormal as well as heteronormative order. Baker adds that these qualities of monstrous queerness exhibit Kristevan abjection: they “[do] not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). Merricat’s age exemplifies the disruptive qualities of a monstrous queer. On the opening page of the novel, Merricat reveals her age, which is eighteen, as the second detail about herself. At the age of eighteen, individuals are considered to be in adolescence, which is a liminal stage between childhood and adulthood. However, some may argue that eighteen might be seen as the beginning of adulthood, as eighteen is an age that is on the verge of becoming a “woman.” While this is a valid argument, I contend that Merricat insists on remaining in adolescence, therefore perpetuating a condition of ambiguity. For example, she frequently fancies extraordinary creatures and situations, such a horse with wings and living on the moon, while displaying no interest in conforming to conventional gender roles for women, such as carrying out domestic duties or entering into heterosexual marriage. Merricat’s refusal to grow out of her fairytale-like fantasies keeps her intact from cis/heteronormative society, thereby reinforcing her queerness. Furthermore, the term “fairy” itself, of course, may have queer origins. Mat Auryn notes theories suggesting “that the use of word fairy as a slur for queer men is because the fae folk were known for their lack of sexual inhibitions as well as their disregard for gender in their intercourse” (xii). Fairies’ nonnormative practices related to gender provide a ground to discover fairytale’s queer potential to disrupt the heteronormative system.
Castle is not a fairytale per se, but its use of the Gothic imaginary together with its obviously fabular qualities do make it especially susceptible to fairytale and folkloristic analysis. As Emily Banks observes, “[t]hroughout Castle, Jackson similarly signals the revision of heteronormative expectations by invoking and subverting fairy tale motifs” (176). From the novel’s outset, the text frequently queers Merricat’s identity by means of fairy-tale-like elements. Since childhood, Merricat has imagined her sister Constance as a “fairy princess” (9) with “long golden hair and eyes as blue as the crayon could make them, and a bright pink spot on either cheek” (19-20). She has done so because she thinks Constance as “the most precious person in [her] world” (20). This description deceptively predisposes readers to read the entire narrative of Castle as a traditional heteronormative fairytale, in which a knight rescues a damsel who is being threatened by a perverted old villain and marries her at the end. However, Merricat’s fairytale imagination already displays hints that it will violate those expectations. First, instead of creating a male prince who will rescue Constance, Merricat places herself in the position of the rescuer who saves Constance from a covetous man who thinks of marrying her for money or beauty or both and keeping her inside a prisonlike house. In her imagination, Merricat volunteers to take the role that has been traditionally occupied by a cisgender male figure. Merricat’s fairytale suggests it is still possible for a heroine to live “happily ever after” without a heteronormative union.
By the same token, Merricat’s recurrent tendency to imagine herself as a werewolf provides another motif in her queer fairytale. Almost as soon as she begins her narration, Merricat says that “[she has] often thought that with any luck at all [she] could have been born a werewolf” as “the two middle fingers on both [her] hands are the same length,” but she doesn’t, so that “[she has] had to be content with what [she] had” (1). This information about Merricat’s “two middle fingers” may seem negligible, but that she offers it along with her age indicates how significant it is to her sense of who she is. To be specific, the werewolf remark suggests how “often” and wistfully she imagines being something other than a mere girl. In this reading, what she expresses as “what [she] had” stands for her physical body and her identity as a human girl. The fact that she keeps imagining herself as a different being implies she thinks about ‘transcendence,’ which will help her to get out of her current human-girl identity. Merricat’s regret over not having been born as a werewolf reflects her desire to become a literally monstrous queer subject. Though she passes as female within the patriarchal household, her desire to become a werewolf obviously runs counter to the heteronormative gendering of individuals. Merricat’s self-perception as monstrous queer is already free from the gender-binary system. To define her merely as a “girl” neglects the latent trans-female and trans-heterosexual nature of this character.
Moreover, the fear Merricat provokes in the village youth aligns her with Baker’s observation that the monstrous queer threatens children in particular—the products and inheritors of heteronormative society. At the end of the novel, after fire destroys the Blackwood mansion, the villagers immediately perceive Merricat and Constance as children-eating monsters. A woman who passes by the Blackwood house uses fear to urge her children to avoid approaching the Blackwood mansion. She says, “[the Blackwood sisters] hate little boys and little girls” (141), and “[t]hey never come out except at night … and then when it’s dark they go hunting little children” (141). Merricat, who has become a children-eating monster, obtains the solid notoriety of a queer subject resisting a reproductive future. Lee Edelman claims “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (3) because after maturation, the children will become proper citizens and leaders of a society, ensuring the stability of the heteronormative, patriarchal social structure. Merricat never stops displaying her enmity toward children, perfectly suiting Edelman’s definition of queerness, and further demonstrating the extent to which she stars in her fairytale as the monstrous queer figure—except not as villain, but as protagonist.
Yet another example of Merricat’s monstrous queerness is found in her use of the symbolic phallus so as to queer gender divisions rooted in heteronormative society and appropriate patriarchal power for her transgender purposes. Her raising of Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushrooms, in the garden evidences this point. Colin Haines suggests an intriguing point about this name of the mushroom. Referring to Darryl Hattenhauer’s “homophonic rendering of this Latin name into English,” Haines notes that “the name suggests ‘a man-eater phallic’” (qtd. in Haines 177). Metaphorically speaking, Merricat (with the help of Constance) is raising phalli that feed on human men. She is the subject who compounds a medicinal material that serves both as a signifier of masculinity and as the tool with which to “eat up” the signified of masculinity.
In raising her mushrooms, Merricat reminds readers of nothing so much as a witch. Specifically, she evokes the penis-theft motif in Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the manual for witch-hunting that guided Catholics and Protestants who persecuted accused witches in the late fifteenth century. According to the book, penis-stealing could wear different forms such as making the man lose his sexual function or even magically removing his organ (Kramer and Sprenger, Part I Question IX). Significantly, the phallic power embedded in Amanita phalloides is not the power employed to persecute women, but made up as the phallus preying on men. Merricat is capable of creating penises by herself, and then using them to attack their erstwhile owners—a monstrous queer who threatens phallic power, evoking the fear of the penis-stealing witch, and amplifying that fear into the palpable form of the mushroom.
Merricat’s queer performances, taken jointly, let her escape the boundary of femininity and expand her gender identity, using a genderqueered form of phallic power to serve herself. Without being constrained by sex assigned at birth, Merricat swims through different gender identities through antipatriarchal and transpatriarchal acts.
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Merricat’s familicide brings several changes to the Blackwood family that eventually free it from the fetters of the heteropatriarchal matrix. They signal the beginning of queer potentialities, not only for Merricat’s gender identity, but also for her refashioned, queered family. Merricat is now living with Constance; Uncle Julian, the only male survivor; and her cat, Jonas. Merricat and Constance are in charge of most of the house chores. Merricat procures food and other necessary goods on regular trips to the village, while Constance does all the kitchen work and cares for Julian, who is bedridden. Emily Banks points out that “[Jackson’s] protagonists are not, however, intent on escaping their confinement; rather, they reimagine and recreate the structures, surrounding them, redefining the parameters of kinship and repurposing the domestic as a shelter from the outside world” (169). If we accept in addition that Merricat’s gender is ambiguous, her bond with Constance and Julian also starts to appear queerer: elective, rather than purely biological, affinity begins to win out. Familicide removes, in particular, the reproductive mode of inheritance through male lineage.
Such a change stands out all the more clearly in light of Jack Halberstam’s contrast between heteronormative and queer time as terms for articulating the construct of the heteronormative family. Halberstam defines heteronormative time as a continuity that revolves around the generation of families, and space as the place or culture in which reproduction of the heterosexual family happens. He identifies three elements constituting heteronormative time, including the time of reproduction, family time, and the time of inheritance:
The time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples… many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing … The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. (5)
The central point of this statement is that the pursuit of a stable future through family-making and reproduction is essential to the construction of heteronormative time. In contrast, Halberstam further explains that, “[q]ueer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Therefore, creating a new mode of life outside “the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety and inheritance” (6) is what it means to live in the rhythm of queer temporality. While heteronormative time always posits the existence of a future, queer temporality focuses on “the here, the present, the now” (13). It “expands the potential of the moment and … squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand” (12). Subjects in queer temporality do not prioritize prolonging their life or culture into the future through their descendants. They deviate from the linear flow of time and its demands that they “mature into” citizens of heteronormative society. Instead, the life of queer subjects is a series of “experiments”: they design the very moment they are facing with non-reproductive and non-heteronormative practices which have never been imagined or scripted by heteronormative subjects.
In light of Halberstam’s theory, the Blackwood family clearly moves toward queer time when they begin to deviate from a reproductive future. After the familicide, the remaining Blackwoods lack not only the presence of its former male heir (Merricat’s brother, Thomas), but also the “respectability and scheduling for married couples” that are the imperatives of “repro-time.” After all the married couples within the household die, the household stops functioning in relation to procreation. The Blackwood household is also now distanced from “family time,” which Halberstam defines as heteronormative day-planning based on the central premise of providing care for children. The remaining family members—Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian—do not engage in heterosexual relationships, nor do they participate in bearing and rearing children.
However, the remaining Blackwoods do stick to a different kind of order, opposed to heteronormative time. Banks argues that Merricat replaces the reproductive future with a “preservative future”: a mode of life that refuses both reproduction and the “heteronormative marriage economy” (182). Two particular practices characterize this shift: “collection and preservation” (181). Merricat has always buried things since childhood, and these things serve as a collection of her “treasures” (41). They are “held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard” (41) the Blackwoods. This protective power is generated through the collection and preservation of Merricat’s precious objects under the land, without making new goods or purchasing more products from the outside world: preservation over reproduction, ritual over consumption. Merricat’s daily routines come to be based not on the needs of children, but rather on looking after her collection of magical safeguards.
By tacitly endorsing her act of burying possessions, Constance demonstrates her assimilation into Merricat’s preservative future. Merricat keeps a box of silver dollars by the creek and John Blackwood’s gold watch chain as part of her collection for her magical rituals. The gold watch chain can be seen as a form of currency in a capitalist context, as it has the potential to be converted into money. The silver dollar is also a currency that circulates in the capitalist labor market. Charles, the cousin who will be extensively examined in the subsequent section, is an intruder who adheres to the system of male inheritance and is enraged by the use of the gold watch chain and silver dollars in Merricat’s rituals, asserting that she has to rights to money (77, 88). However, Constance shows nonchalance to Charles’ enragement. When Charles blames the remaining Blackwoods for leaving the gold watch chain hanging on a tree, Constance responds by saying that nobody wants it, as if she is oblivious to the financial value of gold (77). When Charles tries to punish Merricat for burying the box of silver dollars, Constance comes to her defense by saying, “I suppose it belongs to Merricat” and “she likes burying things.” Constance further claims that “[n]o harm is done” by the burial of money (88). What distinguishes Constance’s remarks is that she describes the silver dollars as “things” instead of “money,” treating them as commonplace objects like a doll, a book, or Merricat’s baby teeth, thereby characterizing them differently from the capitalist understanding of money. In a heteronormative sense, the “possessions” are expected to be turned into capital in order to support the entire family by a member who is in charge of those valuable objects, which is, in general, the patriarch. Contrary to this expectation, Constance lets Merricat freely engage in magical rituals, prioritizing personal freedom over the maintenance of the family—a unit endorsed in heteronormative society. Such a support of Merricat’s burying ritual contradicts both the reproductive future and the prevalent consumption practices in capitalist society. In essence, Constance supports the deviant practices of Merricat, allowing their anti-capitalist and anti-heteronormative rebellion to continue.
Lastly, the Blackwood family deviates from the time of inheritance: the generational flow of time where “family values, wealth, goods, and morals” are passed down. In the Blackwood family, this transmission of familial tradition no longer takes place: the generation of their parents is gone. The only remaining character from the old generation is Uncle Julian, but far from conveying tradition or values, he is relegated to an infantile position where he needs a constant caretaking from Constance. Julian seems to be a character who tries to pass down the history of the Blackwood family by writing autobiographical accounts about them. However, his writing demonstrates a closer alignment with queer temporality rather than the time of inheritance. Julian’s fragile mental state results in his fragmented and past-oriented experience of time. The familicide incident is the pivotal element of Julian's writing. He meticulously collects and preserves newspaper clippings related to this occurrence, ensuring that no details escape his attention. During a tea visit with Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, Julian intentionally scares Helen by bringing up the murder incident in a detailed way, even though she does not want to talk about it anymore. However, when the visitors leave, Julian asks Constance whether the mass murder of the family truly happened (39). In other words, Julian’s perception of reality and illusion has become indistinct, suggesting discrepancies in his recounting of historical events. Moreover, memories of the past intrude upon Julian’s present. For instance, when his health deteriorates, he calls Constance Aunt Dorothy, who was Julian’s deceased wife (51-52). Julian’s time oscillates between the past and present, causing a disruption in the linear progression of time towards the future.
That Julian’s writing remains incomplete due to his unexpected death is also significant. His familial autobiography is meant to be read by people in his own generation and passed down to posterity, positing the existence of descendants born out of heteronormative marriage. However, the unfinished manuscript implies that it will not flow into the reproductive future but rather into a state of stagnancy, akin to the preservative future. It is fitting, then, that Julian’s incomplete family narrative is stored in the cellar amongst the foods made by the Blackwood women. Merricat describes that the bottled foods in the cellar were “a poem by the Blackwood women” (42). Indeed, Blackwood women have accumulated the stored foods since Merricat’s great-grandmothers’ generation, demonstrating their long-standing tradition. Although Julian’s assigned gender is male, his creation is now being added to the feminine depository of the family, which could be interpreted as a symbolic transgendering of Julian from an assigned male person to a transfeminine subject. Based on this analysis, Julian can also be considered a character aligned with Merricat’s queer community.
Drawing on the above discussion, it is evident that Merricat, with the collaboration of her two remaining family members, refashioned the Blackwood family into a micro-community severed from heteronormative time. Initiated by Merricat’s poisoning incident six years ago, the hierarchical relationship within the family is destroyed; and with the death of John and Thomas, the patriarchal tradition of male inheritance has also been put to an end. The life of Merricat’s new family is cut off from the flow of time that connects them to the past of the family and to the reproductive future. Instead, as Halberstam suggests, the queer temporality governing the Blackwood mansion is about keeping the queer subjects and their mode of life in “nowness.”
Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian’s community maintains its queer temporality without disturbance. However, when Charles Blackwood invades their property things begin to change. Charles is a greedy and opportunistic cousin, eager to claim the Blackwood wealth as his own—a powerful male figure who threatens to re-heterosexualize Merricat’s family. When he appears, the Blackwood mansion becomes vulnerable to patriarchal intrusion: the house gets filled with smell “of his pipe and his shaving lotion, and the noise of him echo[ing] in the rooms all day long” (78). When he enters the Blackwood mansion, Constance stresses his resemblance to John, exclaiming that “[she] knew [Charles] at once; he looks like father” (57). The advent of Charles underscores that the patriarch does not perish easily, resiliently regenerating its phallic power.
Charles’s status as a patriarchal negation of Merricat’s achievements appears most explicitly when he tries to nullify the story of her crime. When Charles finds out that Uncle Julian is working on the memoir in which he discusses the trial, he asks, “[C]an’t it all be forgotten? There’s no point in keeping those memories alive” (66). He wants to suppress the narrative of Merricat’s rebellion, the initial point of decentering heteropatriarchal order in the house: purposefully neglecting her achievement to avoid its repetition although this attempt proves to be futile since Julian’s manuscript gets to be intactly preserved in the cellar by Merricat and Constance.
As a first step to disempower Merricat, Charles takes away her role in the household. Paying a visit to the village every Tuesday has been Merricat’s job; however, after becoming a part of the family, he volunteers to assume this role. Even Constance agrees to let him take this job, saying “[she] never feel[s] quite comfortable when [Merricat is] away in the village” (72). But by usurping Merricat’s role, Charles relegates her to the ghostly position she assumed when John was alive, belittling her presence within the household. He starts trying to bring Constance back to heteropatriarchal society so that he can marry her and become the ultimate heir of the Blackwood property, seducing her into betraying the queer community that Merricat has cultivated. She says it is wrong “to let [Merricat] and Uncle Julian hide here with [her]” and says “[they] should have been living like other people” (82, emphasis mine). Charles’ presence—essentially, the haunting of Merricat by John’s ghost—alludes to the uncomfortable truth that deconstructing heteropatriarchal order may not be as viable as Merricat believes, as well as the formidable power of patriarchal ideology and tradition. She comes to the realization that “Cousin Charles [is] a ghost, but a ghost that could be driven away” (61). If she wants to protect her queer community, she must disempower this last patriarch.
Faced with this threat, Merricat performs an exorcism to drive the ghost away. Merricat’s act of muttering the name of mushrooms becomes an incantatory shield against Charles’ moral hectoring. She wields the phallic power verbally, shouting “Amanita phalloides” to intimidate Charles when he tries to scold her for the habit of burying valuables. She also hides herself to avoid confrontation with him, and on one occasion as she comes back from her hiding place, Charles admonishes, “I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do with you, [b]ut whatever I do, you’ll remember it” (90). In response, Merricat simply mutters the names of poisonous mushrooms, deflecting his words. Though she does not kill him by using any of the poisons she mentions, uttering their names and fatal effects is her way to reveal her full destructive potential: she is implying that she can poison him to death if he ever attempts to harm her, just as she killed John. If Amanita phalloides is symbolically understood as a man-eating phallus, murdering Charles with this mushroom is straightforwardly a case of the monstrous phallus devouring the father’s ghost.
However, Charles, unintimidated, expresses his strong desire to stay in the house (93). He claims he should teach Merricat a lesson to get rid of her “hiding and destroying and temper” (98). Before Merricat can cause further disorder, he sets the house in alarming order. Uncle Julian used to dine on his own, with food “all over himself” because of his physical frailness. Charles declares that Uncle Julian’s infantile behavior should be corrected, his wheel chair “pushed up tight against the table” with a “napkin under his chin” (80, 98). He conscripts Constance into controlling Merricat’s hygiene: Constance herself maintains her hair “combed back nicely” and tells Merricat to “wash [her face]” and “comb [her] hair” as “[she and Charles] don’t want her to be untidy at the table” (96, 98). She also volunteers to clean up Charles’ room after Merricat makes a mess there, turning the room into an orderly state again. By this point in the novel, Charles, who is aiming to reestablish patriarchal order, seems to take the upper hand, despite Merricat’s resistance. Charles’ unflinching grip over the Blackwood mansion leads Merricat to turn to her last resort: fire.
Merricat’s arson is an anti-patriarchal performance: it kicks Charles out of the house and thereby exorcises the ghost of her father. She knocks Charles’ smoldering pipe on the table next to his bed fall into the wastebasket, setting it on fire. He screams and runs away; and the fire destroys almost all of the house, leaving only a small portion of the ground floor and the cellar intact. Seen through a queer perspective, the fire implies purification rather than mere destruction. It not only drives Charles out of the house, but also realizes Merricat’s hope of effacing Charles’ traces from home. The arson is a purification ritual, fully eradicating the traces left by her father’s ghost. The expurgation of these patriarchal remnants is required for the beginning of a new queer future.
Soon after the fire, Merricat and Constance recreate their home as a haven purely for themselves. These two siblings, the ultimate survivors, are the true partners in familicide, cooperating with each other in overthrowing the reign of John, proving their qualification as owners of the queered household. Merricat, Constance, and their demonic companion and pet Jonas are now the sole members of the recreated household. Looking at the ruins of the mansion, Merricat says, “Nothing [is] orderly, nothing [is] planned; it was not like any other day” (115). The orderly state of the patriarchal household has finally been subverted, and everything has reverted to a blank slate on which Merricat can inscribe a new way of life.
Merricat’s habit of preservation now alters somewhat. Before the fire, Merricat and Constance occasionally allow outsiders, such as Helen Clarke or Uncle Julian’s physician, to visit. However, when the house burns, the two characters experience the ridicule of onlookers who shout, “[L]et it burn,” as they vandalize the house (104). As their antipathy toward the world outside grows, they begin to practice much stronger degree of self-preservation within the house. Merricat swings the shutters of the porch and “the tall dining-room windows, and then [she comes] inside” (120) to lock the front door to block trespassers, confirming “[Helen Clarke] will never take tea here again” (124). Merricat’s plan to barricade the house ensures the Blackwood mansion will be a firmly sealed container.
After the fire, the Blackwood mansion appears to be a viable place in dire need of reconstruction. It is also a portrait of a queer household which has deviated almost completely from the norm of “what a family should look like.” As in the case of Merricat’s and Constance’s undefinable gender identities, the Blackwood mansion has also taken on a liminal identity, transitioning from the “castle” of John Blackwood to the queer stage of Merricat’s fairytale.
* * *
Upon the ground where they destroy the house of patriarchy, the two siblings are left to navigate a way to procure livelihoods. The novel ends with the two making sure of all the doors leading to the outside of the house are locked every morning, and Constance trying to cook meals out of the remaining vegetables. There is no hint of how they plan to survive beyond these limited means. The story may seem like it culminates in an implausible dead end.
Yet such a reading overlooks one of the most important settings of the novel: the moon. Merricat imagines her life on “the moon” quite often—seventeen times in total. At the beginning of the novel, Merricat confronts Jim Donnel, who starts bullying her by speaking ill of the Blackwoods right in front of her. She imagines, “I am living on the moon … I have a little house all by myself on the moon” (14). Merricat’s obsessive imagining of the moon is associated with expanding her queer community beyond the realm of the domestic, which remains rooted in human civilization. The moon serves as a space with queer potential unbounded by the heteronormative ideology governing human society on Earth. Such resonances are old. According to Luc Brisson, Aristophanes believed that:
the original male was an offspring of the sun, the original woman of earth, and the androgyne of the moon, which participates in both sexes … the moon, which is between the earth and the sun, receives its light from the sun, and like the sun, illuminates the earth. This intermediary position, and the succession of its phases, makes the moon a locus of the reconciliation of contraries; hence its ambivalent character in the field of sexuality as well. (“Androgyny”)
Jackson enthrones the queerness of the moon, making it into a place that a genderqueer figure wants to reach.
When the house burns down, Merricat says, “I am thinking that we are on the moon but it is not quite as I supposed it would be” (133). Merricat’s queer household still has much to improve and solidify before it can be a complete queer community. After going through the familicide and the fire, the site where the Blackwood mansion used to be is now emptied of patriarchal signifiers and turns into a bare ground that waits for cultivation. In this yet-to-be-explored realm, Merricat finally succeeds at procuring a happy ending with Constance without being hindered by a male prince of the traditional fairytale. Richard Pascal claims “all this represents a kind of honeymoon: she and Constance … are finally living in the (honey)moon world of her favorite escapist fantasy, her personal fairy tale that she has always resorted to as a means of distancing immediate reality” (198). On the very first night after the fire, she takes Constance to her hiding place—which used to be a space for Merricat alone—and “push[es] her gently until she [sits] down” and “[takes] Uncle Julian’s shawl away from her and cover[s] her with it” (110), getting ready to sleep outside the Blackwood mansion which is now covered with ashes. Merricat’s hiding place is no longer merely an escape from the Blackwood masculinity, but is now also a matrimonial bed.
Even if the happy “marriage” cannot last more than a day, it can still count as valuable time on the queer “moon.” Of course, what Halberstam defined as queer temporality does not exclude queer subjects from planning for the future. It is still possible for Merricat and Constance to try to inscribe a new way of life in their newly-founded refuge, living according to their plan. However, were the plan not to work out, to call their lives failures would be to misunderstand queer time altogether. Merricat’s marriage with Constance is a way of conducting a queer experiment outside cis-heteropatriarchal time and space. To quote Halberstam, all of Merricat’s queer practices throughout the novel are her way of “squeezing new possibilities out of time at hand” (12, emphasis mine). What matters to Merricat and Constance is not prolonging their queer order and practices into the far future, but inventing a way to resist cis-heteronormativity at every moment. No matter what happens to the siblings in the near future, the two characters can be regarded as an embodiment of the queer experiment, envisioning a different kind of life outside heteronormative society in mid-twentieth-century America.
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