Individual presentation:
• Heather Levy:
The Wire Fence Our Father Built to Keep People Out: Breaking the Cycles of Transgenerational Trauma in Shirley Jackson’s Novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(60 min)
Abstract:
In this presentation, I examine Shirley Jackson’s interest in women’s ability to overcome generational trauma in her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson, 1962). The novel models distress tolerance, radical acceptance, and emotional regulation in the lives of Mary Katherine and Constance Blackwood, two orphaned sisters who are violently persecuted by their community after the deaths of six members of their immediate family in a poisoning scandal. Mary Katherine has concealed a deadly dose of arsenic in the family sugar bowl, which is served with blackberries at the family dessert table. Her older sister, Constance, washes the bowl and takes the blame, offering the flimsy explanation that there was a spider in the bowl. Because there is not enough evidence for a conviction, Constance is exonerated by the law, but the sisters are never forgiven by their community, whose members believe they acted in murderous collusion. Vindictive parents in the village teach their children to taunt the sisters. Constance develops agoraphobia and is unable to leave the family estate, while Mary Katherine suffers obsessive compulsions during her weekly visits to the grocery store, coffee shop, and library.
Constance and Mary Katherine Blackwood try to overcome the invalidating family environment perpetuated first by their father and later reinforced by their rapacious cousin Charles and the punitive villagers. Over the next six years, the inseparable sisters develop healthier coping strategies while nurturing their Uncle Julian, who suffers from dementia and mobility impairments. This healing is interrupted by the next generation of familial aggression in the form of Cousin Charles, who closely resembles their deceased father. He steals their father’s watch, wears his suits, attempts to seduce Constance, and threatens to institutionalize Mary Katherine, who inadvertently sets the family mansion on fire by throwing his pipe into a trash basket. Villagers loot their property while firefighters halfheartedly extinguish the blaze. The sisters ultimately resist the violence of their community and family by strengthening their affectionate bond and continuing their secluded but exuberant lives in the badly burned estate. In 1962, the same year Jackson published We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. Mary Katherine and Constance can be read as early examples of back-to-the-land, off-grid survivalists who try to protect their environment; one way the Blackwood sisters cope with trauma is by caring for the forests and foliage on their estate. Jackson’s novel and Carson’s environmental critique appeared in the same year, making the ecological dimension of the Blackwood sisters’ survival especially suggestive.
Jonathan Lethem comments on Shirley Jackson’s enduring psychological relevance: “She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity, repression, conformity, and repression tip into psychosis, persecution and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic injuring cherishing twin” (Lethem, 2006, p. 148). Drawing also on the research of M. Swales, S. E. Crowell, R. Wolbert, L. Martin, J. Lyng, D. Flynn, and others, this presentation considers how We Have Always Lived in the Castle anticipates dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha M. Linehan; see Linehan (1993). Julie Corliss, executive editor of Harvard Heart Letter, explains that DBT is “grounded in mindfulness and behavioral therapy” and teaches skills for managing intense emotions (Corliss, 2024, p./para. xx). In this reading, the Blackwood sisters build a life worth living.
Keywords: agoraphobia, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, emotional regulation, literary psychohistory, Shirley Jackson, transgenerational trauma, trauma recovery, violence
Short Bio:
Dr. Heather Levy is a professor of English Literature at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of two peer reviewed books Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction: Dead Reckoning and The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction. These studies of intergenerational violence and trauma also investigate strategies of resistance, meaningful resilience and unexpected transformations. She is also the author of more than twenty peer reviewed journal articles on human suffering in the shorter fiction of Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. She can be reached at .