University of Tulsa

"The Hero Is Married and Ascends the Throne": The Economics of Narrative End in Shirley
Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"
Author(s): Honor McKitrick Wallace
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 173-191
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20059137
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 "The Hero isMarried and Ascends the Throne":
The Economics of Narrative End in
Shirley Jackson'sWe Have Always Lived in theCastle
Honor McKitrick Wallace
University of Tennessee

The quotation in my title, from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the

Folktale, is a classic ending not only of Russian folktales but also of many
traditional novels: the hero gets the girl and settles down in relative mate
rial comfort, if not outright wealth.1 For Propp, the hero's reward is "the
princess and her father": as Teresa de Lauretis explains, Propp's "intimate
connection between the functions of the princess and her father in folk
narratives derives from her historical role in dynastic succession, the trans
fer of power from one ruler to another."2 The kingdom is transmitted
through the body of the princess, a textbook example of traffic in women.
But the conflation of the princess, her father, and his lands further implies
that the erotic and the economic are conjoined and that the traditional
ending Propp describes fulfills both the hero's sexual and material desires.
The connection of the erotic and the economic raises the question of
whether psychoanalytic theories of narrative, with their primarily erotic
can the role of material in narrative?a
emphasis, explain acquisition
further connection mean a
question compounded by what this might for

specifically female protagonist. On the one hand, she might, even in her
own stories, function as the erotic and (mediated) economic reward for the
hero's labors; on the other, she herself might receive such rewards. In the
pages that follow, I derive a theory of economic desire from psychoanalytic
theories of erotic narrative desire and then explore the female protagonist's
relation to economic desire, describing how such desire operates in the
marriage plot. I then look at ways female protagonists claim economic
desire for their own, examining Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in
the Castle and looking more briefly at other woman-authored novels. I
argue that such claims profoundly rework economic and narrative para
digms in order for the female protagonist to receive a material reward?a
throne, if not a the end of her narrative.
princess?as
In The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory,
Jay Clayton points out that economic theories of narrative desire, along
with other kinds of desire, play no role inmuch of narrative theory, which
chooses to focus on erotic models informed by psychoanalysis. But while

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Clayton suggests that the erotic emphasis "follows its own economy of
economic desire as I develop it here receives much of its force
pleasure,"3
from its connection to the psychoanalytic. By this I do not mean that
material reward in narrative serves as a mere of nego
symbol successfully
tiated psychoanalytic tensions. Rather, the economic is produced by the
erotic and is bound up with it.
Judith Roof argues inCome As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative that nar
rative production shores up, and is in turn produced by, desires that can be
configured both as erotic and as economic. Thus, "the connection between
human heterosexual reproduction and capitalist production provides an
irresistible merger of family and state, life and livelihood, heterosexual
order and profit whose formative presence and naturalized reiterations gov
ern the forms, and of narrative."4 She estab
conceptions, logic, operation
lishes a link between the erotic (at least the heterosexual erotic) and the
economic (at least the capitalist economic) as they produce and are pro
duced by narrative. Roof's link, however, is metaphoric and operates
causally only in the abstract (in that we think about family, economics,
and narrative in the same ways because their ideologies support each
other). Her link is limited also by its emphasis on capitalism. How, for
instance, would the connections Roof mentions intersect in the precapi
talist folk tales Propp describes? I argue that the connection between these
two factors ismanifested?and should be examined?not only formally but
also materially.

If, as Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative, narrative is motivated by the working out of death drives, mate

rial is necessary as testament to the In negotiating death

production ego.5
drives, the ego leaves amaterial trace behind. When confronting Sigmund
Freud's explanation of death drives, Luce Irigaray suggests in Speculum of
theOther Woman that a man "build[s] up his ego" "in order to use his life
to ward off death for as long as it takes to choose a death."6 Irigaray adds
that "if this ego is to be valuable, some 'mirror' is needed to reassure it and
re-insure it of its value. Woman will be the foundation of this specular
duplication, giving man back 'his' image" (p. 54). In narrative terms, the
need to confirm the building of one's own ego ("raising his own tomb" as
Irigaray describes it, p. 54) constitutes a legacy: the working through of
narrative desire that entails leaving a monument to oneself behind. As
Roof's connection between sexual reproduction and economic production
suggests, this legacy might take the form of offspring (or the potential for
offspring) or of economic achievement. When, then, the hero "ismarried
and ascends the throne," he prepares for (re)production?prepares to
establish a testament to his ego and its narrative.

But the female protagonist relates to the notion of legacy differently

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from the male hero. Freud's explanation of the "work of death" in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle and Brooks's narrative elaboration in Reading for the
Plot are, as critics have noted, particularly masculine understandings of
desire. As Irigaray asks when she confronts Freud, "is working out the
death drives limited to men only?" (p. 53), or is this model of narrative
closed to a woman? If she does not carry out "the work of death," what
structures her narrative? The narrative paradigm that sets up the death
drive and its work as a propulsion system operating according to Brooks's
description cannot be accessed by women. In Irigaray's critical rereading of
the Freudian paradigm, women do not experience ardent desire that is ulti
mately by submitting to the work of death; instead, "by sup
sublimated
pressing her drives, by pacifying and making them passive, she will func
tion as a pledge and reward for the 'total reduction of tension.' By the 'free
flow of energy' in coitus, she will function as a promise of the libido's
evanescence, just as in her role as 'wife' she will be assigned to maintain
coital homeostasis, To guarantee that the drives are bound
'constancy'

in/by marriage" (p. 53). Furthermore, Irigaray argues,

by maintaining the subject-object polarity in sexual activity, woman will pro

vide man with an outlet for that "primary masochism" which is dangerous
and even life-threatening for the "psychic" as well as the "organic" self. . . .
Freud states that this "primary" or "erogenous" masochism will be reserved to
the woman and that both her "constitution" and "social rules" will forbid her

any sadistic way to work out these masochistic death drives. She can only
"turn them around" or "turn them inward." .. . masochism added
Secondary
to primary masochism?this is apparently the "destiny" of the death drives in
woman, and they survive only because of their unalterably sexuate nature,

through the erotization of this "masochism." (p. 54)

If women characters cannot follow Freud's narrative pattern of desire, it is

because they are already destined to sublimate desire through sacrifice and
have, moreover, been to like it. Thus, a female character confirms
taught
the male legacy and testifies to his working out of death drives, rather than
producing her own legacy.
The most obvious way for a woman to participate in the production of
conventional narrative is through reproduction. Indeed, the heroine's role
in the marriage of conventional narratives that "accom
plot prefigures

plishment." Rachel Brownstein argues that a heroine demonstrates her

worth by choosing the right man; in other words, she participates in repro
duction by determining her mate,7 but as de Lauretis explains, even that
participation is illusory. Describing the process of female maturation as a
"journey" (making the female a hero in her own life), de Lauretis explains
that "the end of the girl's journey, if successful, will bring her to the place
where the boy will find her. . . . For the boy has been promised, by the

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social contract he has entered into at his Oedipal phase, that he will find
woman waiting at the end of his journey" (p. 133). The heroine, insofar as
she is involved in the marriage plot, finds that her narrative is not, finally,
about her: "thus the itinerary of the female's journey, mapped from the very
start on the territory of her own body ... is guided by a compass pointing
not to reproduction as the fulfillment of her biological destiny, but more
exactly to the fulfillment of the promise made to 'the little man,' [i.e., the
man as a child] of his social contract, his biological and affective destiny?
and to the fulfillment of his desire" (p. 133). While Elizabeth's "journey"
in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice certainly leads to the joys of love and
character reformed, she also as reward for his reform, and,
figures Darcy's
as far as the material dynamics of the plot go, she is ensured continued
social existence via her status as mistress of and,
Pemberley presumably,
mother to the Darcy heirs.
If, then, reproductive accomplishment is a testament to the hero rather
than the heroine, what about can the
productive accomplishment?what
female protagonist achieve economically? If the social structures of the
process and of marriage ensure her erotic the eco
oedipal marginalization,
nomic structures of capitalism also limit her options.
Under capitalism, of course, emphasis ismoved from land to capitalist
exchange of commodities. Karl Marx tells us that because "the exchange
of commodities breaks through all local and personal bonds inseparable
from direct barter, and develops the circulation of the products of social
labor; ... it develops a whole network of social relations spontaneous in
their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors."8 Since those
social relations are at bottom economic relations, an economic
imagining
position outside that system is difficult. To succeed in capitalism is to suc
ceed within a system, to enroll in production and in economic relations

with other producers and the hegemony that guides them. Despite Horatio
Alger stories stressing the role of individual will in achieving capitalist
rewards and despite the implication of such stories that one can choose
success and freely pursue it, the networked nature of capital precludes
autonomy on the part of the producer. While itmay be possible to imag
ine a precapitalist situation in which the participants of a given economic
microcosm worked and lived in relative independence from prevailing eco
nomic relations, to imagine such isolation today is rather more difficult.
Indeed, this imagined system may be just that?imagined: a fantasy for our
times, an escapist dream allowing us to play (but only play) with the idea
of "living off the land."
But even as fantasy, fictions of economic independence have their func
tion. A fantasized precapitalist past is one of the possible articulations of
"romantic anticapitalism" discussed by Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy

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 -
(who also identify feminism, however, as a form of romantic anticapital
a
ism). They argue that "the romantic vision takes moment of the real past
in which the negative traits of capitalism were lacking or were attenuated,
and in which human values crushed under capitalism existed still, and
transforms it into a utopia.1'9 Just as feminist scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis
that "romance as a mode may be activated: when
speculates historically
middle-class women lose economic power in the transition from precapi
talist economies and are dispossessed of certain functions, the romance
may be a compensatory social and narrative narratives in
script practice,"10
which the female protagonist achieves economic self-sufficiency act as a
fantasized compensation for the way capitalism fixes subjects, particularly
female subjects, into place.
In this quest for self-sufficiency, for what might be described as a type of
economic stasis, even a economic mode, the female protago
perhaps lyric
nist works out new relations to capital and to land. But because economic
achievement involves her in modes of and because narrative
production
tries to achieve a state of rest that nevertheless assures pro
traditionally
duction, the end of her story is fraught with ideological implications. The
nature of her end, her status as a and the question of
story's producer,
whether she simply reiterates the patriarchal, heterosexual, and capitalist
ideology of conventional narrative make determining the extent of her
achievement difficult.
Certainly, one ingredient in the female protagonist's attainment of eco
nomic self-sufficiency is space, in the form of land and/or a house, that she
can claim for herself. Land and houses allow characters relative indepen
dence from capitalist economic relations. They enable a fantasy of self-suf
the sense that one can survive one's
ficiency, simply by cultivating garden.
The importance of space may at first appear how
personal problematic,
ever, given the way property figures in conventional narratives. For

instance, Brownstein, noting that finding a home is a goal in all of

Austen's novels save Emma, out that "the heroine's story is always
points
. . . about and being defined by a space, about finding a space of
defining
one's own. Austen's novels are about attaining the external correlative

(husband, social position, house) that makes inner potential real" (p. 95).
The female hero's achievement of a space of her own, seen in this light,
does not seem so radical. Further, de Lauretis argues, the space to
quite
which narrative directs itself is already inscribed as feminine and thus rein
forces gender difference; she quotes Jurij Lotman who says that "closed
space can be as 'a cave,' 'the 'a house,' 'woman'" 118).
interpreted grave,' (p.
Here the domestic space iswhere the male hero ends up, or it is the hero
ine's reward for marrying the right man.11 In either case, attainment of land

and house shores up Brownstein's "materialistic society based on the

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preservation of private property through monogamy" (p. 43). But this asso
ciation between land/house and the end (both in the sense of a goal and of
termination) of narrative hardly subverts the capitalist paradigm. Surely
such subversion more than a in the hero's or a
requires change gender
rejection of the marriage plot. The female protagonist, then, must redefine
her relationship to capital and yet attain a space of her own over the course
of her narrative.

One key difference between the female hero's attainment of property

and property's role in conventional narrative is the way property fits in
with production. In the latter case, of course, private property is preserved
through matrimony, and it also enables further production, inasmuch as it
is tied to reproduction and to the economic potential of future generations.
As Roof explains,

while the "natural" events that seem to account

for narrative's . . .
shape
appear to be natural, they are in fact not
only reproductions of the quintes

sential^ naturalized "biological function" of human reproduction, they are

also metaphors of capitalist relations of production. The connection between
and production occurs in their common to a productive
reproduction appeal
joinder. Where in human male and female come together to
reproduction
produce offspring, in capitalist production capital and labor come together to

generate products, (p. xvii)

In narratives of the traditional heroine, house and land are the sites and
economic guarantors of further production. If, however, house and land do
not enter into production
or enter into it in a way that subverts capitalist

production, the traditional narrative end may hold new possibilities, new
answers for what desires motivate female characters.

Even if the ideological implications of house and land as the heroine's

rewards for proper in a capitalist system can be subverted,
participation
there remains de Lauretis's critique of what Lotman describes as "closed
space": the feminization of the notion of house as the end point of narra
tive. Indeed, as we shall see, female can enact a sort of revised
protagonists

domesticity in their relations to the property they achieve by/as the end of
their stories: the spaces in which the the female protagonist's narrative ter
minates are often distinctly feminized, even in excess of Lotman's para
digm?not merely associated with the feminine, the spaces bear the
imprint of traditionally feminine activity, such as cooking or decorating.
Admittedly, the subversive potential of the female protagonist's narrative
in relation to capital, joinder, and gender difference is threatened if that
narrative follows and reinforces the gender markings of the most tradi
tional narratives. But the feminization of the end space may occur in such
a way that economic relations and (re)production are redefined or enlisted
in a cause other than that of in essence, so that the
capitalist production:

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feminized end space takes on utopie connotations and creates systems of

relations that are independent of the capitalist paradigm. Such a utopie

configuration of the end space is by definition a fantasy, an imagining of
new economic structures, and whether that subverts the
fantasy adequately
actual capitalist system in which the text itself is produced and consumed
remains to be seen.

In Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in theCastle (1962), Merricat

and Constance must free themselves from the property they have inherited
and from the social and economic networks that constrain and threaten
them. Littered with the remnants of patriarchal wealth, the castle grounds
create a persistence of the Law of the Father with all its attendant woes.
The Blackwood money, the Blackwood land, and hence the Blackwood
daughters are all marked by Constance and Merricat's father and his
wealth. Despite the anchoring that wealth provides (Merricat comments
that "we always had a solid foundation of stable possessions"), it often
seems to do more harm than good.12While wealth ensures the regular com
panionship of other well-off members of the community, it separates the
girls from the largely poor village and creates hostility towards them among
the Moreover, mere presence threatens to reinstitute the
villagers. money's

marriage plot, insofar as Constance is sought, not merely for her beauty,
but for her possessions. Such a plot resolution would reduce Constance to
a mere stand-in for her dead father, recalling Propp's formulation of the
princess and her father as the twinned objects of heroic quest.13 Thus, the
Blackwood fortune threatens to transform Merricat's tale, and accordingly
the novel, into the adventure of Cousin Charles, who goes forth in search
of Constance's hand, her father's fortune, and indeed his identity (Uncle
Julian constantly confuses Charles with his dead brother John, and Charles
covets and even wears effects). As Merricat notes, "he
occasionally John's

already had our father's bedroom, after all, and our father's watch and his
gold chain and his signet ring"?in short, Charles has taken over the
father's erotic space and the symbols of authority (p. 120).
But Merricat's narration undoes the fairy tale because she endeavors to

demonstrate that Charles is a "ghost" (p. 88) or a "demon" (p. 120) rather
than a in armor. Merricat's narrative also
knight shining Interestingly,

places her in the role of Propp's hero, questing after the princess
Constance: "when I was small," Merricat confides, "I thought Constance
was a fairy princess" (p. 28). The difference between Charles's forestalled
heroic narrative and Merricat's is what acquisition of the means:
princess
whether closure is founded on a union dedicated to the reproduction of
capital and life or whether a different set of desires is answered by the
story's end.
If the Blackwood sisters and their castle are marked by their father's eco

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nomic moreover, also have access to an alternate economy,
legacy, they
one that may inform Merricat's quest to live happily ever after with her sis
ter "on the moon" (p. 63). This "economy" returns the word to its original
meaning of household management in that it is almost entirely domestic.
Like any fairy-tale castle, the Blackwood manor has a treasure room, but in
it, rather than gold and gems, the legacy of the "Blackwood women" waits:
"there were jars of jam made by great-grandmothers, with labels in thin
pale writing, almost unreadable by now, and pickles made by great aunts
and vegetables put up by our grandmother, and even our mother had left
behind her six jars of apple jelly" (p. 60). Constance adds to this store: as
Merricat teases her, "you bury food the way I bury treasure" (p. 61). But
while Constance's rationale for preserving food follows the capitalist logic
of production and consumption?"the food comes from the ground and
can't stay there and rot; something has to be done with it"?the jars of food
actually enter into a specifically lyric stasis, in that they "stood side by side
in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood
women" and, moreover, cannot be consumed (p. 61). With the exception
of the most recent products, the food has turned lethal.
As Merricat reveals by comparing Constance's food preservation with
her own "treasure," both sisters are engaged in an ongoing stockpiling of
worthless objects. This activity implies exactly the sort of economy and
domesticity that removes the objects of exchange from the market. In part,
the purposelessness of the sisters' activities allows slippage of the very
notion of worth. Thus, when Charles reacts with outrage toMerricat nail
ing the watch chain to a tree, Constance answers "it's not
gold important"

(p. 112). While Charles "mourn[s]" over the chain and catalogues the ways
to enter such into economic circulation?"I could have worn it;
objects
what a hell of a way to treat a valuable thing. We could have sold it"?the
sisters read the object differently. Constance sees it as a toy for "silly
Merricat," while Merricat sees it as a talisman against Charles and his plans
to reenlist the household in the system of production (p. 112). Likewise,
Constance's putting-by of food becomes a signifier not of consumption, but
rather of the "poem" the Blackwood women create, the matrilinear legacy
of inedible food that anchors Constance in her sense of herself as caretaker.
Both sisters develop alternative value systems to the economic standards
implied by their father's fortune, with Constance establishing value in
domestic terms and Merricat inmagical symbolism.
If the sisters have enabled a slippage of the worth of what Charles calls
"valuable thing[s]," that slippage is only partial, however, and they remain
tied to conventional economic relations insofar as their accumulation of
turns on occasion into economic so in their use
objects exchange?clearly
of money. The first Merricat narrates is, after all, a
episode shopping trip

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during which she exchanges money, noting that "the people of the village
disliked the fact that we always had plenty of money to pay for whatever
we wanted; we had taken our money out of the bank, of course, and I knew
they talked about the money hidden in our house" (p. 9). The Blackwood
money, out of sight and no longer reproducing itself through the bank,
nevertheless still circulates in the village. Moreover, Constance's domestic
economy is implicated in the patriarchal Blackwood ethos; the "poem"
created by generations of Blackwood women is absorbed by the patriarch's
name and house: "as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was

found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of
Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world"
(p. 2). Just as killing off the father did not fully abort the marriage plot, the
interrogation of economic worth conducted through Constance and
Merricat's "economies" can be
only partial.
Only partial, that is, until the break with the village becomes explicit.
A fire redefines what the Blackwood "castle" signifies. Though the evening
before, the house is a symbol of security for Merricat?"the roof pointed
firmly against the sky, and the walls met one another compactly, and the
windows shone darkly; it was a good house. ... Iwanted to be inside the
house, with the door shut behind me" (p. 142)?after the fire, with its top
gone, "the house ended above the kitchen doorway in a nightmare of black
and twisted wood" (p. 167). Moreover, as Merricat notes, "it seemed that
all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and
soiled" (p. 168). Significantly, this "treasure" is in the form of domestic
goods associated with the Blackwood women, including "silverware that
had been in the house for generations of Blackwood wives" and "table
clothes and napkins hemmed by Blackwood women" (p. 167). The house's
security and contents have been violently redefined, and this thus estab
lishes new relations to material
goods.
Deprived of its masculine "roof pointed firmly against the sky," the
house no serves as testament to Blackwood or as a stor
longer prominence
age place for the lineage of goods brought to it by Blackwood women.
Instead, it is restructured to fit the sisters' more modest needs. must
Space
be redefined, reorganized with Constance's kitchen as the center. The parts
of the house that remain, yet are marked by the old order, are excluded
from the sisters' new space. Thus, their mother's room, once a site
drawing
of social exchange and status ("our mother had always been pleased when
people admired her drawing room") is shut off from view and use as the sis
ters "closed the ... door behind [them] and never opened it afterwards" (p.
176). Merricat sleeps in the kitchen, and the sisters spend "a good deal of
time at the front door" watching the strangers come by (p. 205). The visual
dynamics of the house have also been shifted. While once the house was

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for looking at, an ostentatious public symbol of the Blackwood opulence,
now, despite the many gawkers, the house is mysterious, hidden behind
boarded-up windows and climbing vines, and the sisters are the only ones
who can see it.As Merricat explains, "we had new landmarks in our house,
just as we had a new pattern for our days. The crooked, broken-off frag
ment which was all that was left of our lovely stairway was something we
passed every day and came to know as intimately as we had once known
the stairs themselves. The boards across the kitchen windows were ours,
and part of our house, and we loved them. We were very happy" (p. 212).
If the house once served as John Blackwood's legacy, a testament to his
reportedly considerable ego, it serves the sisters quite differently, as some
thing occluded and thus testament to nothing as well as the necessary, pro
tective space in which the sisters can meet all their desires.
Likewise, the dynamic between the sisters and the villagers and with it
their economic relations have been altered. Obviously, the sisters' money
no longer circulates in the village and hence disappears from the text alto
gether (with the exception of Charles's brief reference to it). Then, too,
Merricat revises her approach
to her "treasures," discovering, "I was not

allowed to bury anything more" (p. 205). The sole economic relation
remaining between the castle and the village follows the feudal custom of
tribute rather than any logic of capitalist exchange. Though Constance
describes the villagers' habit of leaving food on the doorstep as "the biggest
church supper they ever had" (p. 204), she misunderstands the dynamic,
which is founded not on charity but on guilt and fear. Because the villagers
believe the girls have malevolent power (a power that ultimately derives
from the hidden space the sisters create since the more mysterious they
become, the more the villagers fear them) they offer gifts to avert misfor
tune and punishment. Thus paradoxically, the more thoroughly Merricat
barricades the house and ensures their isolation, the more their influence
reaches into the village. This relation is not one of production; the sisters'
consumption of the food is tied to psychic, not economic exchange.
The sisters achieve a narrative, therefore, that allows them to escape the

logic of reproduction. Constance is no longer available for the marriage

plots laid by their wealthy friends or their greedy cousin, and in fact the
logic of the novel's conclusion in bringing together two women who live,
at least according to Merricat, happily ever after subverts and parodies the
marriage plot.14 Instead of husband and wife, marriage as the proper happy
ending, we have here what Roof describes as "too many girls" (p. 80), the
excess of sameness that shuts down the possibility of production. (While I
do not assume that Constance and Merricat's union is a lesbian one, it

clearly defies heterosexual narrative norms; the suggestion of incest further

violates such norms and communicates sameness.) Thus estab

Jackson

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lishes the end of linearity, of legacy, of forward progression. In short, the
girls have attained a perfect lyric state untainted by the remnants of nar
rative, the intrusions of the outside world, or the necessity of economic
exchange and production.
The economic revisions carried out in We Have Always Lived in the
Castle are certainly not attained by most female protagonists. As I sug
gested earlier, too often the end of a woman's story matches her elided role
in Propp's formulation: she becomes the unspoken object that the hero
marries, the physical reflection of his story. Nevertheless, the emphasis I
place here on the reworking of economic and narrative paradigms sheds
light on a number of endings of woman-authored narratives. Consider, for
example, the conclusion of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980).
Under Sylvie's care, the space of the home is redefined; the parlor becomes
cluttered and dirty because, as Ruth explains, "we had simply ceased to
consider that room as a since ... no one ever came to call. Who
parlor,
would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for
the storage of cans and without value."15
newspapers?things utterly
Eventually, Sylvie and Ruth attempt to burn the house in order to defy
legacy, to leave no "relics to be pawed and sorted and parceled out," and to
learn a new kind of economic existence as vagabonds on the fringes of cap
italism (p. 209). In Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), the women of the
Convent establish an economically independent community but then go
even further, transcending (in one of the "two editions of the official
story") materiality itself, as they "took other shapes and disappeared into
thin air."16 In each of these novels, as in We Have Always Lived in the
Castle y female economic violence from the com
independence provokes
munity, but each novel also suggests escape from those communities. Less

dramatically, but nevertheless significantly, more traditional novels such as

Jane Eyre, with its suggestion that the wife will support the husband eco
nomically, suggest (admittedly vexed) reworkings of economic paradigms.
Thinking through the economic implications of the conclusion of the
female protagonist's narrative may, then, demonstrate subversion not only

of reproductive narrative tropes, but also of capitalist economic structures.

But before my claims for such narratives grow too bold, we must exam

ine the ideological function of their form as well as their content. In these
and other similar narratives, traditional notions of closure are disrupted, as
the logic of the marriage plot, heterosexual pairing and reproduction, cap
italist success stories, and imperatives of production is interrogated. At the
same time, however, one must the success of such
question interrogations,
the extent to which the abiding presence of closure itself reins in their sub
versive potential. The conclusion of the narrative of female economic
independence is both unsettled and unsettling: itmirrors traditional nar

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 independence is both unsettled and unsettling: itmirrors traditional nar
rative ends too for comfort, yet those ends even as it mim
closely disrupts
ics them. In its movement towards closure, it deploys a structure of mean

ing and suggests some sort of final word on the subject?but establishing
what that final word is proves to be an especially tricky business.
In gesturing towards home, rest, and the cessation of narrative in favor
of the lyric, narratives such asMerricat's formulate what Brooks refers to as
"those shaping ends that, terminating the dynamic process of reading,
promise to bestow meaning and significance on the beginning and the
middle" (p. 19), holding out the hope that some lesson can be learned from
the quest. Yet that very gesture, by virtue of its form, is ideologically
charged. Positing an end in such a traditional manner, these narratives sug
gest the possibility of totalization, subscribing to Brooks's gloss on Walter
Benjamin that "only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sen
tence as a signifying totality" (p. 22). While Brooks does not fully explore
the implications of this "signifying totality," others have exposed the ideo
logical work of narrative closure. D. A. Miller, for instance, posits a "cen
tral tension in the traditional novelistic enterprise, namely, as discomfort
with the processes and implications of narrative itself," suggesting that clo
sure calls an ideological halt to the destabilizing forces of the "narratable"
(a halt, as Iwill explain below, that can never be complete).17 Roof is even
more explicit in her analysis of the ideology of closure. "What is really at
stake in the ends of narratives," she argues, is "the impossible, amplified
totality of complete joinder and cessation of desire that are perpetually
denied in favor of the seeds of another story" (p. 5). One's story must come
to an end so that the larger, ideological story can go on: "reproduction in
its promise of continuity also signals individual discontinuity or death; and
the deaths of individuals enable the continuation of a group liable to
excessive production" (p. 21). The pleasure of closure is thus the pleasure
of renunciation of desire in the service of ideology?what Slavoj Zizek in
The Sublime Object of Ideology refers to as "ideological renunciation," an
enjoyment of form for its own sake.18 Sensitive to how ideology and form
map their pleasures onto each other (or are ultimately the same pleasure),
Roof argues that "our comfort in the end is produced by a cause/effect logic
where the end promises an ultimate result" (p. 7) and that "reflecting
finally a belief that meaning can be had at all, the fact of an end appears
to give us a sense of mastery over what we can as a unit"
identify complete
(p. 8). Roof shares Miller's distrust of the end but ultimately concedes its
logic: "criticism relating the parts to the whole also tends to focus on the
end, not as a subject of, but as a to criticism, even while the
precondition
parts themselves are equally important. But if an emphasis on the end is a
product of the ideologies by which the story is formed in the first place, it

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 is difficult to find meaning in the rest of the story without reference to the
end" (pp. 13-14).
Clearly, to let the body of the female protagonist's narrative speak for
itself against its end is insufficient; the interaction between the end and
the middle, the comforting ideological gesture, and the unsettling subver
sive content must be carefully explored. The fact that a story restores equi
librium in the manner of traditional narrative might render it (despite
whatever problematic moments may exist) traditional. Existing as they do
in the half-light of tradition and subversion of that tradition, and present
ing as they do vexed solutions to the problems of economic, psychoana
and narrative desire, such narratives must be examined.
lytic, cautiously
First, then, we must decide how happy the happy endings of these nov
els are. If they are success stories of sorts?successful articulations of female
desire and action?thefulfillment of that desire must be evaluated.
Second, assuming happiness is achieved in these conclusions, we must
determine to what extent it results from collusion with traditional struc
tures rather than escape from them. Certainly, psychoanalytic desire is
conceived of as unfulfillable, insofar as that which is desired ismetonymi
cally linked in an endless chain?the object of desire is never what will
actually answer the desire. When Brooks speaks of the fulfillment of nar
rative desire, he resorts ultimately to the death of desire, in that the desir
ing subject ceases to exist. But my discussion of desire has emphasized, in
apparent paradox, the fulfillment of desire and the continuing existence of
the desiring subject. One possible resolution to this paradox is the shift to
a different kind of desire; hence I address an economic, rather than erotic,
fulfillment. It might be argued that economic desire, in contrast to the
desires addressed by psychoanalysis, operates differently and can be ful
filled.
Not according to Zizek, however, who links psychoanalytic and capital
ist desire, implying that such a distinction is impossible since both types of
desire operate according to an endlessly progressive logic. Like psychoana
lytic desire, economic desire, at least within capitalism, resists fulfillment,
continually moving through a m?tonymie chain, propelled by the excess
that covers its fundamental lack. Thus, economic "pleasure," or what Zizek
refers to as "surplus-enjoyment,"

is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some "normal," fundamental

enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is

constitutively an "excess." If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself,

just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its
own material conditions, ceases to exist if it "stays the same," if it achieves
internal balance, (p. 52)

Here the connection between the logic of capitalist production and het

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erosexual reproduction finds both confirmation and expansion; both eco
nomic and psychoanalytic desire are driven relentlessly forward by exces
sive production covering a lack. Hence, Zizek asks, "is not the paradoxical
topology of the movement of capital, the fundamental blockage which
resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity ... precisely that of
the Lacanian objet petit a, of the leftover which embodies the fundamental,
constitutive lack?" (p. 53). According to this argument, economic desire
within capitalism cannot be sated, and to speak of economic stability and
self-sufficiency as the answer to such desire is to speak of a fantasy that
contradicts desire's very structure.

But some of the novels examined above suggest the possibility of escap
ing the capitalist system. If Zizek's "surplus-enjoyment" is a function of
capitalism, can the female protagonist evade the necessity of surplus by
rejecting any role within the network of capitalist economic relations?
Merricat is a good example of such escape, in that she arrives at an eco
nomic state untouched by capitalist relations. Merricat and Constance
operate, as I have previously suggested, according to a feudal model, and
indeed Zizek ismost illuminating here due to his commentary on Marx's
distinction between feudalism and capitalism. In the former, "relations
between people are mystified, mediated through a web of ideological
beliefs and superstitions" (p. 34), while in the latter, the relations between
people are replaced by relations between objects, so that "the crucial social
relations, those of production, are no longer immediately transparent in
the form of the relations of domination and servitude . . .
interpersonal
disguise themselves?to use Marx's accurate formula?'under the
they

shape of social relations between things, between the products of labor'"

(p. 26). Merricat's narrative reverses Marx's passage from feudalism to cap
italism: while formerly the relationships between the sisters and the village
have been described as relations between things (money for food as well as
envy of class status and material wealth), after the fire the connection
becomes, to use Zizek's "mystified," as the fear and super
phrase, villagers'
stition combine to create a of the sisters as witches, ritu
fantasy requiring
alistic tribute that just happens to take material form. Here one might
argue that Merricat stages a successful retreat from capitalism, that she
ends in a space in which economic desire can escape the insistent forward
drive of capitalist production and thus achieve equilibrium and fulfillment.
That said, the environment that permits the backwards movement to
feudalism is itself already a fantasy of backwardness.19 The castle and its
surroundings are not located historically or geographically and indeed
seem steeped in a vague timelessness; although Merricat notes that "all of
the village was of a piece, a time, and a style" (p. 9), she never pinpoints
the attributes of that style, except to comment on its "ugliness" (pp. 8-9).

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The villagers, in particular, seem unconnected to anything that might be
identified as the networks of national, let alone global, capitalist exchange,
and the very existence of their town seems to Merricat to be cre
arbitrary,
ated not by economic progress but by a sort of aesthetic fantasy: "the
houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste
to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and the Rochester
house and the Blackwood house had been brought here perhaps acciden
tally from some far lovely country where people lived with grace. Perhaps
the fine houses had been captured . . . and were held prisoner in the vil
lage" (p. 9). Thus, Merricat's regression from capitalism to feudalism is
upon an economic environment that operates
predicated already indepen
dently of advanced capitalism?predicated upon an isolation that allows
the superstitious development of alternate economic patterns. The fantasy
of feudal economic relations exists in an already fantasized space outside of
the networks of capitalism.
Then too, although Merricat professes repeatedly that she is "very
happy," her claim must be examined in light of the fact that she is a grossly
unreliable narrator. That she evidently has a pathology that leads her to
kill her family, that she is obsessed with her sister Constance, and that she
believes in magic words and charms might lead the reader to doubt what
she says, particularly her insistence that Constance too is "very happy."
Even ifwe can take Merricat's word that she is happy?there is nothing in
the text to suggest otherwise?we still must question the function of such
happiness. Given the gap that Merricat's pathology has presumably estab
lished between her and her reader, can her narrative tell us anything other
than the lengths to which an insane woman will go to satisfy her obses
sions? Is the success of Merricat's narrative any different from the failure of
a narrative such as Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, in which the protagonist's
challenge to masculine structures of desire leads inevitably to madness?20
I argue, however, that despite the insanity in both narratives, the hap
piness of the endings is qualitatively different. In Nightwood, Robin's
insanity is inarticulate, degraded, and animalistic; such insanity can only
communicate the breakdown of communication itself. In contrast,
Merricat's madness is oddly empowering, a warped model of what can (if
perhaps not should) be achieved once one claims one's own desires and
forges an identity accordingly. Although the reader may not want to emu
late Merricat's quest, he or she can still see in it the successful subversion
of many elements of traditional narrative and thus an alternative to con

ventionally happy endings.

But again, if on the level of content the troubled or imperfectly happy
endings of these narratives subversively highlight the jarring intersection
between female freedom and systems (such as capitalism) that restrain

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women, on the formal level the very notion of a happy ending may subvert
the subversion. When Roof traces the structural implications of the work
of writers largely considered both thematically and formally radical, such
as Monique Wittig, she repeatedly finds that any potentially subversive
gestures, any attempts to escape heterosexual and capitalist ideologies are
ultimately subsumed by "the same old story" (p. 130) and the imposition
of joinder, linearity, and closure. Narrative is a structuring device that
inevitably establishes priorities, hierarchies, and thus values; as Brooks
reminds us, "nanative demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, orders" (p.
4).
Accordingly, Roof demonstrates how subversive content always falls
prey to ordered narrative form. For instance, she points out that coming
out stories replicate the oedipal dramas of identity and the coming
together of binary opposites that, respectively, create and reproduce the
terms of heterosexual reproduction. If,Roof argues, "the lesbian character's
visibility is the end product of a narrative struggle between inner and outer
that results in knowledge about sexual truth and identity, then coming out
stories the same narrative trajectory as dominant cul
embody reproductive
tural stories" (p. 106). Even when subversive content leads to formal
experimentation, like the radical disruptions of the Bildungsroman enacted
in lesbian coming out stories, narrative structure and its imperative to

organize according to heteroideological principles have their way with the

story. For this reason, a text such as Wittig's Les Gu?rill?res, despite the
construction of a lesbian utopia and of ostensibly non-nar
incorporation
rative elements?such as the of women's names?is even
lengthy listing

tually undercut by what Roof describes "very traditional as Wittig's

reliance upon the originary existence of a subject outside of ideology" (p.
131). What Roof claims about the lesbian coming out story might be even
more applicable to the narratives of female economic independence (the
novels Imention often make no explicitly radical challenge to heterosex
uality, though they can certainly be read queerly):
out stories a way for the female who refuses her sexual role
Coming provide
to nonetheless function in narrative and in the world; heteronarrative's
on identity exhibits and contains her desire and the very moment
emphasis
the lesbian's self-affirmation would
presumably free her
heterosexual from

expectations. The coming out story is, thus, a story of sequestration, com

forting and exultant on one level, but robbed of or trading away its really dis

turbing potential to mess up heterosexual systems, (p. 107)

Like the self-outed lesbian, the economically independent female protago

nist, by following the narrative trajectory of the Bildungsroman and by
adhering to the significance of individual identity, may limit her narrative's
subversive potential.

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 Moreover, as Roof argues, "the similarity between the logics of narrative
and Western ideologies of gender partly explains the real difficulty of
establishing a female protagonist who is not somehow recuperated by the
narrative; narrative logic, combined with entrenched gender ideologies,
works more or less invisibly against her" (p. 63). Ultimately, the pervasive
effects of these logics lead Roof to despair of ever subverting structures of
capitalist production and heterosexual reproduction: "To combat het
eroideology would mean thinking outside the system altogether, changing
conceptions of time, cause and effect, and knowledge. To effect such a
change will take more than narrative or a consciousness thereof (pp. 186
87). Although Roof continues to hope for the subversion of narrative pat
terns, she only vaguely sketches on what principles such opposition can
work.

All this might tempt us to despair of ever subverting the narrative of

reproduction, suggesting that any narrative with closure (and therefore,
perhaps, any narrative) is simply another instance of conventional under

standings of gender difference, linearity, and ideological conformity.

Nonetheless, one way out of this narrative bind is to question what might
be toomuch emphasis on closure. As Miller charges, "once the ending is
enshrined as an cause in which the elements of a narrative
all-embracing
find their ultimate justification, it is difficult for analysis to assert anything
short of total coherence. One is barred even from suspecting possible dis
continuities between closure and the narrative moment preceding it, not
to mention possible contradictions and ambiguities within closure itself"
(p. xiii). In contrast to this emphasis on the ending, Miller argues "not that
novels do not 'build' toward closure, but that they are never fully or finally
governed by it" (p. xiv). Perhaps rather than isolating the formal move
ment of closure and it above other movements within the text as
elevating
a whole, we can focus instead on the relations between the middle (and
even the beginning) and the end. This isnot to imply that Roof in any way
ignores how the middle of a narrative connects to its end. Her thesis in fact
is that "patterns in narrative that have never counted because they did not
lead to closure or production" (p. 187) are a vital part of the narrative
"middle" insofar as the "metaphorically perverse" element, that which
defies heterosexual logic, "both threatens to short-circuit and leads toward
a satisfying, very heterosexual closure" (p. xxxiv). But if Miller's con
tention is valid, Roof's assertion of the primacy of closure leads her to over
look the ways in which such moments articulate a resistance (Miller refers
to an and an "uneasiness," pp. x, xiv) that the ending cannot
"instability"
ever silence and cannot negate as a matter of textual
completely simply
pragmatics?the middle has existed, has been read, has articulated power
ful alternatives to even the most of narrative finales.
possible orderly

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Perhaps the subversion of the female protagonist's narrative should not be
sought solely in the ending, particularly not solely in the form of the end
ing, but instead be looked for in the tensions generated by the middle that
as we closure's the
always?as long suspend primacy?destabilizes ending.
The female reward, whether erotic or economic, a or
protagonist's princess
a throne, must be read in the context of the subversive middle actions for
which she is being rewarded.

NOTES

Iwish to thank JayClayton, Bill Kupinse, Thomas Haddox, andNancy Walker for
suggestions offered on this essay.
1
Vladimir of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans: Laurence Scott, rev.
Propp, Morphology
and ed. Louis Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 63.
2
Teresa de Lauretis, Aiice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 113. Subsequent references will be cited paren
thetically in the text.
3
Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and

Theory (New York:Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 63.

4
Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality andNarrative (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), p. xvii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically
in the text.
5Peter
Brooks, Reading for thePlot: Design and Intention inNarrative (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
6 trans. Gillian
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, C. Gill. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 54. Subsequent references will be cited paren
thetically in the text.
7 a Heroine:
Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming Reading about Women in Novels

(New York: Viking Press, 1982). Subsequent references will be cited parentheti

cally in the text.

8Karl
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (New York: The
Modern Library, 1906), p. 126.
9
Robert Sayre and Michael L?wy, "Figures of Romantic Anticapitalism," in

Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G.
A. Rosso and Daniel P.Watkins (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1990), p. 34.
10Rachel Blau
DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985),
p. 2.
11
See too Irigaray's description of "the meaning of [man's] work[s]: the endless
construction of a number of substitutes for his prenatal home" in which home, and
even home are onto the womb, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
building, mapped
trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993,
1984), p. 11.
12
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in theCastle (New York: Penguin
Books, 1962), p. 2. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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 12
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in theCastle (New York: Penguin
Books, 1962), p. 2. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
13
See also de Lauretis's gloss of this comment, quoted at the beginning of this

essay.
14
Merricat's unreliability as a narrator, of course, casts doubt on whether
Constance is as satisfied as she by the narration's conclusion. But the narrative

(that is, the story as told rather than the "real" events upon which it is based?the

szujet rather than the fabula) is simply reinforced by the identification with her own
views that Merricat assumes on her sister's part. Far from the coming of
together
binary opposites, Merricat's narration establishes a sameness, the marriage of two

perfectly identifying minds.

15
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York:Noonday Press, 1980), p. 180.
Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
16
Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 296.
17
D. A. Miller, Narrative and ItsDiscontents: Problems of Closure in theTraditional
Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. x.
18
Slavoj Zizek, The SublimeObject of Ideology (London and New York: Verso,
1989), p. 84. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
19
Because Zizek also uses the word I want to distinguish
"fantasy" (p. 30), my
use of the term from his. Zizek suggests that the "ideological fantasy" (p. 30) is the
"overlooked, unconscious illusion" (p. 33) that "structures] our real, effective rela

tionship to reality" (pp. 32-33), while I am using "fantasy" in the broader sense of
that which breaks with historical and/or scientific reality.
20
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York:The Modern Library, 2000).

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