Part II

Assignement I

P75

"On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie 

and Armanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses 

dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and 

there are no ghosts. On the moon Uncle Julian would be well 

and the sun would shine every day. You would wear our mother's pearls 

and sing, and the sun would shine all the time."

Before I knew we had to discuss some themes and link it to the book, I chose this excerpt because she keeps bringing out the fantasy of life on the moon. I sometimes find it frustrating while reading that she keeps saying this because it won't achieve anything. Thus, she makes her current life more difficult by thinking of all that is wrong with it and how she would do things differently in her own world. What I find even stranger is that her sister often goes into it saying she would like to go to the moon one day. Throughout the book, she comes across as fairly mature and you wouldn't expect her to go along with this story. It seems to me that Merricat is very childish and that her sister has to live with it being that way.

assignement II 

 An important element in a gothic book is the location and the atmosphere it evokes. The location in the book is a castle in which only three people live and almost no visitors pass by. Not only is there the castle but also the summer house in which hardly anyone ever comes and whose path is mossy and generally deserted.

The fact that it revolves around a murder also creates a rather gruesome atmosphere. Yet the characters act very normal about it which makes it even more gruesome. It is not only the murder that creates the presence of death in the story but also Merricat who keeps imagining that people will die if she does not like them.

The typical characters like the villain, the hero are not present in the story. Still, the cousin comes across as the bad guy. This is because it is written in Merricat's perspective. In gothic fiction, women often don't play an important role or at least a supporting role but in this story, they are central.

From this, I conclude that we have always lived in the castle is a gothic story.