Color Coding in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Gothic literature, at its core, can be defined as a form of writing that employs an eerie setting to create a dreadful atmosphere for a dramatic piece. Gothic pieces in literature often feature supernatural elements that are woven into the story although it is not a necessity for a piece to be considered gothic. While these themes were present in literary pieces before the 18th century, it was not until Horace Walpole’s contribution to the genre that it gained recognition of its own in the literary world. The Victorian era however was where gothic literature thrived. Many titles such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein dominated this period. This genre explored themes that were considered dark, gloomy, and taboo at the time. Many works in the gothic literature genre often relied on haunted settings and themes to set the tone for the novel. Even though most of the time the setting was not the focus of the story in gothic literature, it did come into play and sometimes it even played a vital role in the story. An example of this could be the house from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House which involves a house that is deemed haunted by the public. Jackson describes the house in her book as:

No live organism can continue for love to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

This shows that even if the setting in these novels is not the main axis of the plot, they do serve a purpose. With all of that said, it is possible to argue that these ruined cities and lands are, at the basis of the story, what help the author create a gloomy atmosphere where the plot of the novel can continue to evolve.

Although these descriptions of scenery can be quite substantial to the novel itself, sometimes words alone can fail to describe the picturesque environment the novel itself is set in. And where fancy words fail to do the job, color coding comes into play. Color coding, for short, can be defined as classifying elements of a story by a system that allows an author to mark people or settings with contrasting colors to help the audience better understand the characteristics of their said novel. Dan W. Wagner wrote under Experiments with Color Coding on Television that:

Several recent literature reviews have been concerned with the use of color in visual displays. Color has been studied both as a method of presenting realistic or natural imagery and as a means of coding information.

These color coding tactics can vary from book to book, with some only toying with primary and secondary colors to give their story life while some others choose to incorporate the lack of color in people and places to emphasize the lifelessness of these places and organisms. In gothic literature especially, color coding can be quite crucial for the lack of color can be used to represent the apathy of a certain setting, time, or person. The absence of color in gothic literature is also used as a tool to signify the lack of liveliness. As the story progresses it can be quite hard to develop an insider-outsider relationship between the main characters and the antagonists that the story is adamant to villainise, therefore color coding for that reason alone is of vital importance.

Shirley Jackson’s last published novel before her death, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which was published in 1962, tackles the story of a girl named Mary Katherine Blackwood. Her story is one for the books for she is not like her peers. Mary Katherine, or as her sister Constance and the tenants of her town would like to call her Merricat, is a little girl in a small town, but what makes her story unique is the trials her family had to face. Her family was brutally poisoned by Mary Katherine herself which the reader does not find out until the very end, and her sister Constance had to face the consequences for her crime instead. Even after the jury found Constance innocent during the trials, the town still went to exclude the Blackwood family from their daily affairs. While some people like Mrs. Wright and Helen Clarke were not as tough on Constance and Mary Katherine, the other citizens were mocking them every chance they got. A recurring instance of this is singing wicked nursery rhymes whenever the sisters are spotted in town.

Merricat and Connie, would you like a cup of tea?

Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?

Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

And as if that was not bad enough for Mary Katherine, the townspeople kept gossiping and whispering around just as Mary Katherine passed by them at the grocery store. And when their cousin Charles makes his first appearance that is what marks the start of the downfall for the Blackwood family as they know it. Mary Katherine and Uncle Julian are not fond of Charles and his behavior from the very first minute he shows up, ergo Constance blindly trusting him to know what is best for them is irritating them because of that reason. The Blackwood family takes a big hit when Charles enters their mansion. From the very first moment he enters their home, things start to shift for Mary Katherine. And these changes do not stop until Constance and Mary Katherine are the only people left in the house with everyone thinking they are now just two ghosts haunting the ruined and burned-out mansion.

In an unsent letter, Jackson wrote:

We are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize, but this fear, not a named sin. Then it is fear itself, fear of self that I am writing about… fear and guilt and their destruction of identity.

This letter explains the state of Constance and Mary Katherine’s mentality in the book quite well. Ever since the trials they have been hiding out in their cozy mansion and they have been afraid to step foot outside for fear of losing their identity. Due to their introverted cold nature, the town starts to perceive their behaviour differently. As a result of that Mary Katherine and Constance isolate themselves from reality even further with Mary Katherine only leaving the house once a week to get groceries. She then goes on to create a world, or a moon as she likes to imagine it, where she and Constance are the only tenants, and they can do whatever their heart desires. In “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson's Use of the Gothic”, John G. Parks explains this phenomenon as such in the following passage:

It moves from a situation where the Blackwoods are caught between internal fear and external anger, through the chaos of terror and violence, during which time the top story of the Blackwood mansion is gutted by the fire and the house ravaged by hostile villagers to a new order, not wholly of this world, which is referred to as life on the moon.

Because the Blackwood family has been wronged by the town so many times, Mary Katherine does not like to associate them with colors that could potentially relate to happy incidents whereas when it comes to her sister Constance, Mary Katherine describes her as if she is the sun trapped in a world that does not deserve her. This narrative is intriguing for Mary Katherine depicts others as demons and ghosts every chance she gets. One example of this is when Mary Katherine saw her cat, Jonas. Jackson wrote “I saw Jonas in the doorway and Constance by the stove but they had no color. I could not breathe, I was tied around tight, and everything was cold. “He was a ghost.” I said.”. Although Mary Katherine goes on to claim that both Charles and Constance are still devoid of color; when she closes the distance between them at the end of that paragraph, it is evident that it was not always this way. Mary Katherine described Constance as a very lively and colorful human being before the arrival of Charles. Jackson wrote:

When I was small, I thought Constance was a fairy princess. I used to try to draw her picture, with long golden hair and eyes as blue as the crayon could make them, and a bright pink spot on either cheek; the pictures always surprised me, because she did not look like that; even at the worst time she was pink and white and golden, and nothing had ever seemed to dim the brightness of her. She was the most precious person in my world, always.

This proves that Mary Katherine only sees Constance in color. Constance being her only constant in this ever-evolving and changing world, is the only thing Mary Katherine seems to care about. The same cannot be said for the town, however. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson’s use of color in the world Katherine has created for Constance and herself in contrast with the lack of it in the outside world and its citizens, is used to emphasize the dichotomy between the shunned Blackwood family’s journey to alienation from society altogether.

The town was not always this cruel towards the Blackwoods. It all started when their mother married their father. There was a lot of conflict surrounding the Blackwood family and the tenants of the town after Mary Katherine’s mother and father tied the knot whilst constructing one of the most beautiful mansions in town. Mary Katherine states this at the very beginning of the book by saying “The people of the village always hated us.”. When Mary Katherine poisons her family to live her dream life with only her sister Constance, it only makes matters worse for them. While Mrs. Wright and Helen Clarke, their neighbors from the village, occasionally visit the Blackwood sisters for afternoon tea, the other tenants choose to look the other way when they cross paths with the Blackwoods. Mary Katherine describes Helen Clarke and Mrs. Wright’s behavior with the following words:

Helen Clarke took her tea with us on Fridays, and Mrs. Shepherd or Mrs. Crowley stopped by occasionally on a Sunday after church to tell us we would have enjoyed the sermon. They came dutifully, although we never returned their calls, and stayed a proper few minutes and sometimes brought flowers from their gardens, or books, or a song that Constance might care to try over on her harp; they spoke politely and with little runs of laughter, and never failed to invite us to their houses though they knew we would never come. They were civil to Uncle Julian, and patient with his talk, they offered to take us for drives in their cars, they referred to themselves as our friends. Constance and I always spoke well of them to each other, because they believed that their visits brought us pleasure.

While people like Mrs. Wright, Helen Clarke, Mrs. Crowley, and Mrs. Shepherd are somewhat civil and warm towards Constance, Mary Katherine, and Uncle Julian; the same could not be said for the other people in their village. Some were not as bad as others, but some people had to nerve to gossip or mock them right to their faces. While this behavior lasted for a very long time, after the town trashed the Blackwood’s mansion, the dynamic changed. Perhaps it was because they grew a conscious overnight, but after they made the Blackwood’s lives a living hell they went back to try and change everything as if nothing had happened. Their inconsistent and toxic behavior just made it a lot worse for Mary Katherine to recognize the people from the village and their behavior as genuine. Samantha Landau wrote about this matter in “The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies” as follows:

Removing the characters from the town shows their physical isolation as well as the mental obstacles that prevent them from participating in village life.

Because of these reasons, and additionally, with the unexpected mood swings, Mary Katherine associates both the town and its tenants with tones of grey. Jackson uses expressions like “pain and without life” to describe the town as Mary Katherine is walking past it. Even a very bright dress Mary Katherine spots someone wearing does not stay colorful and blends in with the rest of the town. Jackson wrote the following sentence to showcase how Mary Katherine viewed her sister Constance:

She was round and pink and when she put on a bright print dress it stayed looking bright for a little while before it merged into the dirt grey of the rest.

This quote could very well tie in with the town’s reasons for being so afraid of the Blackwoods. The town is made of the color grey, and everyone is lifeless whereas Constance is sparkling with life. People are afraid of what they do not know, in this case, if the town is not capable of recognizing color then Constance who is screaming color would be the stuff of nightmares. The same goes for Constance and Mary Katherine, as they are very imaginative and lively people when they cross paths with anyone who is distant and cold, they would be frightened. In a journal entry titled “The Real Horror Elsewhere: Shirley Jackson's Last Novel”, Stuart J. Woodruff explains Mary Katherine’s situation:

In radical opposition to the grubby village and its equally grubby inhabitants stands the castle, guarded by Constance, and in the polar contrasts between the so-called “normal” world of the village and the “abnormal” world of the castle, we discover the novel’s underlying pattern or design. Whereas the villager is grey and grimy, the castle appears to be basked in perpetual warmth and sunshine.

This just shows that the mansion serves as a barrier between the village and the Blackwoods, keeping them in while wishing them out of this place. Seeing that she views the town as grey and grim most of the time, Mary Katherine starts to villainize the town, not to say they are all innocent for bullying Mary Katherine, but she did kill her family after all. In another journal entry titled “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic”, Roberta Rubenstein wrote:

Each time the possibility arises that Constance might leave the claustrophobic world of Blackwood House—might go “outside”—Merricat feels emotionally imperilled or chilled.

This is yet another example of Mary Katherine distancing herself and her sister from the outside world for fear of the unknown. This ties in with her fears of the outside world as she knows that anyone that she does not recognize or anyone who lacks color is not going to fit in her little world on the moon. During “Shirley Jackson: ‘My Mother's Grave Is Yellow.’”, Dale Peck explains Mary Katherine’s moon situation as:

If the life you see is ugly, shut your eyes and dream of a better one. My mother’s grave is yellow, would you like a cup of tea? The poison in this cup is the dark side of imagination, the unconscious, but it's also the bitter antidote to a more quotidian but no less certain death, of conservatism, provinciality, or just plain old-fashioned boredom.

Dale points out that her moon idea derives from her imagination getting the best of her. She simply does not like that the world she has to live in lacks color while Constance and herself are, unlike others, as colorful as they can get.

To conclude, Shirley Jackson's use of bright colors and the absence of color helps her create the atmosphere this story needs. Mary Ellen Snodgrass mentions in her book titled Encyclopaedia of Gothic Literature that:

Jackson was a master of atmosphere, which she established through visual details drawn from quirks of New England architecture and homelife.

With Snodgrass’ comment on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it is clear to see that Jackson's use of colour coding helps her descriptions of characters and the landmarks she used within the town. The color grey is used throughout the book to highlight the lifelessness of the environment Mary Katherine is residing in and to contrast it with the vivid mansion she has always lived in.