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Shirley Jackson had two abiding fascinations: haunted houses and the aberrations of the human mind. In a survey of Jackson's oeuvre, Lenemaja Friedman categorizes her early works as “psychological novels” and her later ones as “novels of setting” in which residences become characters in their own right (1975, pp. 86, 104). In her last two completed novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the author's dual interests coalesce. Eleanor Vance appears to commit suicide so that she may remain in Hill House forever. Likewise, Merricat Blackwood seals herself inside her family's home. In each instance, a woman becomes inseparable from the house in which she lives. This elision of house and character is especially pronounced in Merricat's situation. While Hill House slowly consumes Eleanor's psyche, Merricat and her home are indivisible from the start. Moreover, in Castle, Jackson adds a new dimension to the idea of house-as-personality by designing the Blackwood home to mirror the mental condition of its most troubled inhabitant. Like her house, Merricat is a kind of castle: isolated, forbidding, and well defended.
Jackson's novel has been read as a challenge to the conventional nuclear family,1 related to the Cold War era,2 and contextualized within the (female) Gothic genre.3 Roberta Rubenstein takes a distinctive, object-relations approach to the text, exploring how it depicts “the ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship” (1996, p. 317).4 Extending and particularizing her work, I consider Castle from a multitiered perspective that combines classical psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, and (psychoanalytic) sociology to explicate the archaic wishes evinced by Merricat and realized by her tale. I