The Society of Sisterhood: External Boundaries and Purity Vs Danger

I almost killed my sister once. It was an accident. Or it would've been, if you squinted.

We were living in an old house that our grandfather bought us on his death bed. He didn't know he was on his death bed. None of us did. He worked as a trucker, and you wouldn't believe how wealthy he was. He had dreams to fix up the house, make it everything our grandmother had spent years dreaming of. He managed to remodel the garage in a month into a bedroom before he began feeling weak; the hospital told him he was stage 4 for a very rare and complicated cancer. It was the first case this hospital had seen in decades. I remember my grandmother and my mom calling it the Egyptian Disease. I don't know what that means. I don't think they did, either.

Anyway, he was gone fast. Within the month. It hit my family hard; he was the only one who worked, both my mother and grandmother were too sick to work. My grandmother had lost her soulmate, and she had 2 previous marriages to prove it. This was the man that was supposed to live and grow old with her. I was just about to start second grade, my sister first. I was old enough to understand that he was dead, and I remember staring blankly around his funeral, as my sister bawled into my mothers dress. My reaction to death has always been inappropriate. My mother told me, "It's okay to cry" and I scanned her puffy, streaked face, before mumbling, "I know."

My mother told me a few years ago that when he died, she did, too. Maybe that's why she didn't have a job for over a decade while my sister and I faced homelessness and food insecurity. She would say she was too sick to work. Her doctor told her so.

            "No, Brandi," she would hush over an empty table of soda cans, "I can't apply for disability. I'm not disabled."
Up to this day, my mother insists she's not dying. I think at this point she must believe that. And belief will get you through a hell of a lot of shit that you shouldn't.
My grandfather's room was empty for a handful of months or years, before my uncle was released from prison. I had vague memories of him from my very early youth; he would put me in a blanket and swing me around again and again. My mom told me he was an artist. She asked me to make something for him, so I drew a picture of us holding hands before shyly giving it to the stranger who we were now living with. I have no idea why he went to prison that time. Or the time before. Or the time after. I was always too young to know.
My family held a weird philosophy where, if my sister and I were fighting, they would lock us in the bathroom and tell us to go ham. Anything to get it out of your system, they would muse. They were those fake New Jersey Italians, you know? One day, after a year of living with my uncle, my sister and I were coming home on the school bus. I don't remember exactly what she did, but I remember I was sitting in front of her by myself while she sat behind me with one of her bratty friends. They were making fun of me. It must have been serious, or it must have felt very serious, because when we got off the bus I didn't hesitate to shove and start yelling at her. My uncle who was sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette, gave us a lazy once-over, then opened the front door, and told us that no one was home. She ran inside, screaming, and I followed, screaming. With a slam, the front door was closed, and the chase was on.
We wound up in my sister's room. I straddled her and forced her on the bed, and shoved a pillow into her mouth and pushed hard on her nostrils. She grabbed at me, clawing at my shoulders, yelling something muffled, when suddenly her fingers flexed and went lobster clawed. I threw the pillow across the room and continued to chase her through the house, not caring that she was walking weird now.

She laughs about it sometimes, "Hey, remember when you almost killed me?"

I didn't. Until she reminded me.

She told me once that she remembered tasting metal in her mouth.

Believe it or not, we are still very close. I never see her, though. It is not a distance thing. Its an interest thing.  A change of priorities, perhaps. Yet, I still find myself executing traditions we would do together growing up by myself, and I have insisted on doing these on my own since beginning college. I didn't realize that I had made rituals of these things until, one morning, a few days ago, I informed my partner we had to start our Halloweentown rerun festival, and they asked me what it meant to me to have traditions. I couldn't really come to a concise answer.  

"I don't know, I've just never met someone who has traditions with themselves."

I cant help but think that cant be particularly true. My thoughts turned to Merricat, the cooky and mischievous main character of Shirley Jacksons end all novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. She executes everyday rituals, and, when they are broken, results in dire consequences. My thoughts turned outside to people I know, to people I have read about, like Mary Douglas. Could there be any valuable connection between these modes of understanding? 

For this essay I want to give special attention to Mary Douglas’s work on communities and rituals, and what that means for the unbreakable bond between the Blackwell sisters we see within We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA, and an acclaimed anthropologist and cultural theorist, is seeking to answer a few different questions in her 1966 novel Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, the work itself becoming her most famous, listed in the 1991 Times Literary Supplement, ranking the book among the top 100 most influential nonfiction books published since 1945. The questions she tackles, which I intend to connect to the themes within Shirley Jackson’s distinguished work: What is a society? What are rituals, and how are they viewed within and outside a community? Why do people conduct rituals, especially bodily ones? And, What does the body represent and what power does it hold within a space? 

Let us tackle the question of society first. Douglas simply defines it as a “(...) powerful image,” (Douglas 114). It has a right to control or to stir men to action. Each culture has its own risks and problems. A society must have form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Think of it like this: when one enters a community from the outside, the individual is always burdened with the fact of withholding that community’s traditions with the utmost respect and care. Anyone entering this space knows that there is something sacred and divine within the structure of this space, and it’s the result of blood, sweat, and tears of its people. Perhaps the individual does not agree, but they always abide. Always in respect, and, if not in respect, in fear. Douglas makes a point to say that all margins are dangerous. “If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered,” (121). If the individual breaks code, say, perhaps, wears something out of code, then the community will turn on them. If the crime is worse, or the intention is barbarous, then the community will collapse. All established structures are subject to this and this will be their downfall. 

To address the question of rituals, she first uses the example of the power of an entranceway. Going through a door is able to express so many kinds of entrances. She explains that no experience is too lowly to be taken up in ritual and given a lofty meaning. The more personal and intimate the source of ritual symbolism, the more telling its message. The more the symbol is drawn from the common fund of human experience, the more wide and certain its reception. This is pretty important. As to why people conduct rituals, she sets the important ground rule that we can not casually understand rituals. There is an informant’s bias and an observer’s bias. There is no set way different people from different societies can approach and understand a ritual. She then defines a few ways that rituals are not used for people. She expresses that cultures who conduct rituals do not revel in magic. They are not escaping from reality. They do not ignore death or try to prolong life. The use of rituals, bodily or not, do not compensate for loss. They are used to reaffirm a connection to the world, developing bodily symbolism may be seen to use it to confront experience with its inevitable pains and losses. 

The body, to Douglas, is a model–a representation for any and all bounded systems. The organs are specific and established, all serving and executing their one designated duty all day, every day. This continues until the body dies. Within a society, we can think of this as all members moving and functioning to make the society function. The common worker must go to work, because even without them the whole thing crumbles. When one organ revolts, the body will succumb. “The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society,” (115). The body, in a very real and tangible sense, represents what a society is. We can turn to the members of a society and the way their body holds to see how the greater society is effective. Afterall, how well the poorest of any given society are living is a representation of how well the entire society is functioning. 

Something that also seems fundamental to understand before moving forward to the literary analysis is Douglas’s idea of social pollution. There is external pressure from different societies, from different types of people. There is constant competition due to the functionality of humans. When a society is established, there are rules and means. There are checks and balances. All things function in a line with the otters, each with a set of rules and regulations. When one breaks these rules, the person is punished. However, if there are more than one starting to break (and there will be; the people within a system will be constantly pushing these boundaries from the inside, especially the outcasted) they become a true threat. Danger will always exist from the margins the society established. When these margins are altered, nothing functions right, and when they are tested, everyone is full of unease. Even those who wish destruction upon a society will cower upon observing the fall. Lastly, we can not forget that the system itself creates constant turmoil, such is the consequence for being a society..

Mary Douglass lends an ear to the “The ritual life of the Coorgs (because they) …treat the body as if it were a beleaguered town, every ingress and exit guarded for spies and traitors,” (123). Anything that comes out of the body is never to be readmitted, for there would be great shame. For the Coorgs, women are the caste bearers for their children, either being a positive or negative asset, and the entry from which the purest content may be made. She walks us through the myth of a goddess, which she believes lends a greater perspective to the overall standing of this society:

This is a great bit of information from chapter 7 of Purity and Danger, and we must now turn to the Blackwood sisters of Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The two girls live within two societies–that of the Blackwells, and the greater communit–y. The Blackwell society exists within boundaries, those set in the ground and those unsaid, or perhaps a better term is mutually agreed upon. Their castle is guarded with “(...) a simple padlock and any child could have broken through it, but on the gate was a sign saying PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING and no one could get past that,” (Jackson 18). These margins are an extension of the sisters, the two of them lacking any want to truly leave their castle and the safety of the other. Only Merricat leaves, and even then it is on set days when they must gather ingredients. These days are specific and sacred. When people enter the castle (which they rarely do) these individuals, while occasionally pressing against their margins as is what is natural with an outsider, always resort back to politeness in small numbers. Their guests are given designated areas to visit and the guests “...never offered to step beyond their defined areas,” (22). The guests function on the whim of Constance, on the bearer of blood, sweat, and tears. Perhaps one could argue that this respect is not truly respect, but fear of what Constance has been accused of, but then I raise: that is Douglass’s point. People intruding within a community may respond well to these society’s boundaries because they are afraid. When these people act outside of these bounds, they are thrown out. We see it with Charles, with Helen, with the entire outer village, practically. The castle, of course, is inclined towards downfall, as is any established society. Within the greater society, the sisters are ridiculed, poked at, provoked. Eventually, the villagers learn the power of numbers, but let’s hold that point for a moment.

The rituals that Merricat indulges in on a day by day basis are reminiscent of what Douglass describes in Purity and Danger. Douglass starts with entering through a door, so I will too. As mentioned before, Merricat has a special day when she leaves her castle. On the way back into the castle, she “(...) carefully locked the gate again, and tested the padlock to make sure it held. Once the padlock was securely fastened behind me I was safe,” (19). She does this. Every. Time. Her wooden sign that claims privacy works because she says so, the same way that securing the padlock secures her safety. These are rituals, in the simplest of terms. The boundaries of her society have made these mundane tasks sacred.

Merricat also indulges in a more ‘fantastical’ lists of rituals—she buries things that she believes hold power, designates her days to different ends, makes magical words for protection, and daydreams lucidly and often, finding her way to the moon. The strength of these objects comes from the roots of the thing being buried, hung, or nailed, and of course their source. She buries so many things that she believes she is “(...) walking on buried treasure,” (52). Her days have specific meanings, such as going to the gate on Wednesday and settling that her most powerful day was Thursday, because doing so grants lasting power to her rituals. Her life becomes a large circle of constantly securing and creating in the name of security. When she decides that a change is coming, something forbidden and untold that she believes her and Constance feel, she “(...) decided that (she) would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come. Then (she) wrote the first word (...) in the apricot jam on my toast (...),’ (44). All of these things are rooted in her family lore, and upkeep them. When a book she had nailed to a tree–“(...) a little notebook of (her) father’s” (53)–fell off, this cemented her feeling for a change coming. This marks the worst omen of all. Her powerful ritual has broken. Charles, the bearer of boundary breaking, is coming soon. It is to the whim of Constance that she executes these rituals.

Constance, as the head of the household, establishes and upholds these boundaries. This right was first given to her mother, and the right before that to their grandmothers, and so on and henceforth through all the women in the Blackwood family. The women were the ones who prepared the food and who preserved it. “All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables (...) stood side by side in our cellar and would stay there forever (...),” (42). When thinking of the goddess within the Coorg society and what she means for women and bodily rituals, we can view Constance in an interesting light. Constance is the only one to prepare food. It is to her whim that Merricat and Uncle Julian function, and she herself only begins to question this once Charles makes an appearance. Constance is the only one trusted to know the harvest of their garden, and the only one trusted to prepare it. No one in the family rejects her food, despite being accused of the heinous act of poisoning her family with sugar. The body of her house becomes a means to watch, and she knows where to stand and hold herself so outsiders do not know she is there. She is the only pure one within their household, and not only is she entirely trusted, she is entirely protected. When Merricat killed her family, she chose the sugar because Constance would never eat the sugar. Merricat the organ functions entirely to the head, Constance.

We can not conclude our analysis of the castle without touching on how it falls. Charles, the first outsider to loudly proclaim things wrong with the society, wears on Constance. He wears Merricat and Julian until there is mistrust within the community. The villagers in the greater community are outsiders to the castle, and on the other side of the coin, the castle are outsiders to the greater village. They are the old family, with so much wealth to hoard. The villagers, as their own “outsiders” with their own beliefs, are knocked to taunt Merricat. They sing a song to her: “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? On no, said Merricat, you'll poison me,” (16), the very same song they sing as they burn down their castle. See, the villagers are a nuisance, and never quite a threat to their power, and they only truly become dangerous when they all band together. Oddly, in the end, when the villagers realized they have created a total collapse for the Blackwood sisters, the villagers make their own ritual again, one that seeps into the Blackwood sisters’ living. The people begun bringing food. “Sometimes they brought bacon, home-cured, or fruit, or their own preserves (...). Mostly they brought roasted chicken (...). Once they brought a pot of beef stew (...),” (139). The society crumbles, and everything around it must continue in a way it can. That’s what bodies do: function, continue, adapt.

In order to continue an analysis of ritual symbolism, we must recognise ritual as an attempt to create and maintain a particular culture; the particular set of assumptions by which experience is controlled. In comparing the real life rituals of different societies to that of literary heroines, we can grasp this idea in a Westernized concept that makes sense to us, and get a lot out of it. Any culture is a series of related structures which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated. Certain cultural themes are expressed by rites of bodily manipulation. In this very general sense primitive culture can be said to be autoplastic. But the objective of these rituals is not negative withdrawal from reality. The assertions they make are not usefully to be compared to the withdrawal of the infant into thumb-sucking and masturbation. The rituals enact a very necessary and organic form of understanding social relations and standing, and in giving these relations visible expression and time we enable people to know their own society, morals, and ideals.