We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

In these first sentences of the book, Merricat moodily introduces herself as a figure of precocious learning and distinct prejudice. She is also not simply close to concepts of death but a connoisseur of them, giving the scientific name for a poisonous mushroom and bringing death in quick association with her family.

“In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.”

Throughout the book gender roles will be turned inside-out without respect to tradition. In the village Merricat hates, she observes that the concerns of men turn them into ineffectual gossips who busy themselves with worthless tasks away from home while the women are worn to nubs doing all the important domestic work.

“Our father brought home the first piano ever seen in the village. The Carringtons own the paper mill but the Blackwoods own all the land between the highway and the river.”

Merricat makes her family’s wealth an important aspect of her own personality here. Her individuality and expansiveness of imagination is linked directly to her freedom to roam her family’s vast estate, free of money concerns.