Some Thoughts on an Afterword by Joyce Carol Oates

Spoilers for Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Jackson S (2010) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Penguin Group (Australia), Melbourne, Australia.

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Before I begin, I want to say that nothing I say below is intended to be emotionally engaging at all, nor is it a personal criticism of Oates. I have used her text as an example, one which I find particularly interesting for the reasons I outline below, as well as because I have a great deal of respect for Oates.

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In her 2009 afterword to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Joyce Carol Oates uses the word “retarded”. On its own this would not be particularly noteworthy, but I mention it because I think it’s relevant, for reasons I hope to show.

For some context, Oates specifically says that Merricat sometimes

behaves as if mildly retarded, but only outwardly; inwardly, she’s razorsharp in her observations, and hyperalert to threats to her wellbeing. (Like any damaged person Merricat most fears change in the unvarying rituals of her household.) A mysterious amalgam of the childlike and the treacherous, Merricat is “domesticated” by only one person, her older sister Constance. (Oates, in Jackson 2010:149)

Now, it is worth noting that my experience of reading the novel was quite different from Oates’: she says the reader immediately suspects Merricat poisoned her family, a suspicion I did not have until halfway through the book. The primary reason for this is simply that I could not believe she was eighteen. From within the first chapter I felt that everything she said was extremely childish, and simply could not accept her being any older than twelve (an interesting age for my mind to settle on, I think). One factor behind this is the other way my experience of reading the book differed from Oates’: I found Merricat intensely relatable. To put it crudely, I am one of the ‘mildly retarded’ people with whom Oates semi-implicitly compares her; more formally worded, I’m autistic (plus some other stuff, but we’ll ignore the labels). The behaviour that sparked my thinking “She can’t be eighteen” for the first time was when, in the opening chapter, she describes a whole series of superstitions and more or less magical beliefs (Jackson 2010:1-17). I’ll spare you the details, but when I was a child I experienced a remarkably similar set of superstitions — so similar, in fact, that upon finishing chapter one I put the book down and immediately wrote about them. To this day I have such superstitions (albeit less obviously magical) and rituals that accompany them. So, although I have no specific habits that line up with Merricat’s, I was from the first primed to find her relatable, in a way very few characters in media have seemed to me. Then, as I read more and more of the book, I noticed the sensitivity to eyes and faces. When Merricat walks through town her inner monologue is devoted to interpreting the stares of the people around her, knowing they’re looking but being extremely careful not to look at them, to give no sign of any awareness of this knowledge (Jackson 2010:16). Another phenomenon to which I relate, one that dictates every thought I have when people are around. Merricat refuses to eat when being watched (Jackson 2010:71), which I did for a long time, and I still find being observed when eating an uncomfortable thing. But above all is the way she describes Charles’ face (Jackson 2010:63,64,65,71,72, in chapter five alone). Such emphasis is placed on it being big and round and white, specifically when looking at Merricat, that it feels like the face is perpetually expanding, taking up room and imposing itself, invading the personal space of not only Merricat but also the reader — exactly the way I experience eye contact, or sometimes the simple presence of a person. Even Merricat reciting deadly plants (Jackson 2010:72, for example) felt like home, in the way I get deeply invested in special interests. The parallels I felt with Merricat were more than a little uncanny, especially since not even one of them was something I had found portrayed realistically in media before. Outside Merricat, there are other elements that I could mention (Charles being dismissive towards Uncle Julian in an obviously prejudiced way, for example — Jackson 2010:66 — or the patterned days established very early on — Jackson 2010:1-2).

Then, after finishing the novel, I read Oates’ afterword and found the passage quoted above. In that passage, there is nothing of the things that spoke to me. If Merricat ‘behaves as if mildly retarded’ it is ‘only outwardly’, an example of her ‘treacherous’ character, which hides the fact that, ‘inwardly, she’s razorsharp’. The behavioural habits that are so essential to her character are reduced to an act, and these things — so deeply familiar to me — are opposed to her intellect. Such an opposition is itself the exact opposite of my own experience. For me, the routine behaviours here characterised as external are in fact not only expressions of my internal state of mind, but essential parts of it. My intelligence (if the concept means anything) is not opposed to these habits, it is of the same fabric as them. The ‘unvarying rituals’ are described by Oates as characteristic of ‘any damaged person’.

My goal is not to accuse Oates of ableism or bias, such a thing would be profoundly uninteresting for me. It’s not nice to see someone you find especially sympathetic be described as ‘damaged’, of course, but the emotional response that provokes in me isn’t strong enough to make me type even a single word on the topic. What I find far more agitating is that this is a reading of a novel by someone who very obviously knows her stuff. It’s no secret that Oates is one of the most exciting, thoughtful, and interesting authors of our time, and the references she makes throughout the text indicate a broad familiarity with Jackson’s work and life. Personally I found the book profoundly interesting, and I still can’t categorise or even conceptualise it. I am left in a kind of open-ended awe, the surface onto which any thought about the novel would step is a gaping chasm. And then the afterword, from an admirable author, reproduces point for point the classical depiction of “mental deficiency”. It is described, from the outside, as a totalising deficiency; it is not that the individual has a brain that functions a bit differently and so produces unusual behaviour, no, there is a damage that causes all aspects of the individual’s psyche to reduce in quality. That disappoints just as much as it agitates, because it removes the hope of communicating my own experiences to those who don’t understand it. There is something deeply interesting in the fact that an intelligent person can form such a reductive and old-hat reading of a novel that, really, pushes new ground in many ways. Another example would be what Oates says about food a few pages later. Despite mentioning the claim that Jackson died morbidly obese, Oates interprets the food of the novel as a symbol standing in for a repressed sexuality (Oates, in Jackson 2010:154-158). There is nothing sexual or erotic in the novel, at least in my reading (as evidence of the erotic charge of food, Oates cites the choice of Amanita phalloides (in Jackson 2010:154), presumably referring to its etymological relation to phallus, but that is all; the rest are examples assumed to be validly interpretable as sexual), but the idea that Jackson may be exploring thematics of food is somehow not enough, it must become sexuality.

I don’t think these reductions are Oates’ fault in any way (if they were it would not be of interest), but I also don’t think she’s right; so what are the obstacles preventing her from interpreting the novel in the way that seems so obvious to me? I’m not looking for psychological explanations, I’m looking for explanations at the discursive level: why was an interpretation along the lines of my reading not possible? Oates’ interpretation matches quite closely the psychiatric discourse of the twentieth century. The assimilation of food within a repressed sexuality is obviously reminiscent of Freud, but also many other psychiatrists. More interestingly, the description of Merricat’s intellectual status as ‘mildly retarded’ does not only echo the vocabulary of the era’s medical discourse, it goes much further.

Only recently has the medical field started to acknowledge that conditions such as autism are not developmental defects, lacks, but simply alternative modes of functioning. This seems obvious to me, and to countless other people with such conditions, but twentieth century psychiatric discourse didn’t recognise it. This was not due to a lack of information, psychiatric discourse had access to firsthand descriptions of experience from countless patients. Nor was it due to personal prejudice, which could not explain a phenomenon so widespread, found in so many professionals of so many different countries and social backgrounds, some of whom would have been neurodivergent themselves. Nor is it a matter of the psychiatrists themselves failing, because many of them were doubtless very intelligent. Yet the fact of neurodivergent (especially autistic) experiences was explained, conceptualised, and discussed as lacking something, as being first and foremost a deviation from a norm, and being characterised by their forms and contents only secondarily. Similarly for Oates’ reading of Jackson’s novel: there is no shortage of evidence as to how Merricat thinks and acts, there’s an entire novel’s worth, written in the first person and embodying these experiences in an unusually authentic and clear manner. As Oates notes, Merricat is very upfront, she feels no need to hide her actions or thoughts, or even to justify them, they are simply narrated (Oates, in Jackson 2010:147-148). There is no real question of personal prejudice, or at least there is no evidence of such a thing in Oates’ reading (and her work has undeniably shown an ability to walk in another’s shoes, suspending any judgement of the person, at least temporarily). And there is no question of Oates’ intelligence; although intelligence is, once again, a concept fraught with issues, it seems quite clear that Oates would pass any criteria put forward for it with flying colours. And yet, the same reduction of a wealth of experience to a model of abnormality. I could not say why this occurs. At best — and this is what I have tried to do here — I can pose the question and eliminate several of the more obvious responses.