YMMV / We Have Always Lived in the Castle

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Constance an innocent woman covering up for her beloved, mentally ill sister? Or did she play a larger role in the murders, motivated by her family's treatment of her as a servant? There are clues in the text which suggest that she might have been more involved than it initially appears. She purchased the arsenic, waited suspiciously long before calling the doctor (until she was sure the victims were beyong saving), calmly washed the sugar bowl while her family was dying in the dining room and later told the police that she believed her family deserved to die.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The novel ends with Merricat effectively succeeding in cutting Constance off from the rest of the world and keeping her to herself.
  “And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.
  'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.'
  'I told you that you would like it on the moon.'
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many viewers just watch the film adaptation to see Sebastian Stan.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • While not a horror story, the entire novel has a mostly unsettling feeling to it with Merricat's dreamy but sociopathic narration, and it culminating when the resentful townspeople come to watch the Blackwood mansion burn and cheer, then proceed to destroy it and terrorize the sisters. It's worse to see the violence in the movie, particularly when Constance is attacked, and some men are stopped right when they throw her onto the ground.
• Values Dissonance: Sending children to bed without dinner would be viewed as unacceptable or even abusive in the modern day, but this was considered an acceptable punishment at the time the book was written.^note This detail was, in fact, based on Jackson's mischievous younger daughter Sally, who once went a whole year without seeing the end of dinner because she was sent to her bed before dessert every night; Merricat was allegedly heavily based on Sally. Taking this into account, Merricat poisoning her entire family because she kept being sent to bed without supper for misbehaving seems like more of a Disproportionate Retribution than it would today.

---