“Why do we need to know what time it is?”: Queer Temporality and the Gothic Home in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

This article examines how Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) merges queer temporality with domestic space to challenge normative structures of time, family, and progress. Scholarship has noted the protagonists’ refusal of heteronormative kinship, yet less attention has been paid to the repetitive, ritual-like routines that generate a spatiotemporal order beyond the suburban ideal. The current study traces how Constance and Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood sustain a “perpetual present,” transforming their ancestral house into a sanctuary from Cold War imperatives of productivity and linear advancement. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s concept of queer time, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of sideways growth, and Lisa Baraitser’s idea of “maintenance time,” the article argues that the sisters’ experiences embody a Gothic domesticity characterized by chosen stasis—defying marriage, procreation, and the march toward adulthood. Through their meticulous chores and later rebuilding of the ruined estate, Jackson depicts the Gothic home as an ambivalent site where contentment coexists with underlying constraint. Ultimately, this article enriches the conversation on American Gothic literature and queer theory, demonstrating how nonlinear temporalities and nonmarital attachments carve alternative ways of inhabiting domestic space—ones that subvert societal demands for progress and normative family pattern.