Merricat is 18 years old, and her sister 10 years older, yet they live in a liminal state of arrested childhood, reenacting rites of adulthood in different guises. Constance is locked in a state of eerie, sterile motherhood, constantly doting over her younger sister. Her domain is the kitchen and pantry, where she is constantly baking and cooking, serving tea, and preparing thrice-daily meals. She leaves the house only to garden, and when she’s not preparing food to be consumed immediately, she obsessively preserves it and keeps it in an unfinished basement cellar, joining rows and rows of generational preserves kept by her family in generations past. Constance is the only one who actually meets the material demands of the family. She attempts to create a state of normalcy for the family that rejects the reality that the family no longer has the social standing it once had before the murders.

This domesticity is underscored by several inversions to the expected order specific to the Blackwood family. If Constance is the doting mother, Merricat and Charles vie to become the active father in charge of protecting Constance. Neither of them is very good at it, but Jackson’s purpose here is to demonstrate that while the role of the patriarch is at best an entirely superfluous one, at its worst it is a parasitic relationship, which constantly demands care and attention without ever contributing anything but an abstract sense of self-justifying order.