VCE English Section A: Annotated Exemplar Text Analysis Essay

Back in Year 12, I had a serious love-hate relationship with the VCE English Section A essay. This is the infamous analytical essay where students must respond to a prompt and analyse the author’s ideas, values, and techniques. Like most people, I had been writing this type of essay since year 7. However, I was still unsure about what makes an analytical essay ‘outstanding’. Is it the number of quotes? The use of fancy words? Rigidly sticking to the TEEL structure?? 

Luckily, by the time my exams came I had figured out a good game plan. I triumphantly completed VCE English with a raw 50 study score and a solid 10/10 for the analytical essay. In this blog, I will be deconstructing one of my timed analytical essays for Shirely Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and explaining why this essay would be high scoring 💯!

Essay Question

Sisterhood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle offers both protection and entrapment.’
To what extent do you agree? 

Established against the patriarchal milieu of the 1960s, Shirley Jackson’s proto-feminist novella “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, presents a nuanced examination of sisterhood as both a protective and entrapping force (Context Sentence and Contention).While Jackson exposes how sororal bonds safeguard characters from a hostile society she also reveals their vulnerability before the pernicious force of patriarchy (Argument 1 and Argument 2). Ultimately, Jackson emphasises the protective power of sisterhood, as it prevents characters from descending into constraining stereotypes (Argument 3).

 Examining the complex web of sisterhood, Jackson exposes how it protects characters from a hostile society (Topic Sentence). The expository scene of Jackson’s novella capitalises on Merricat’s first-person narration to emphasise her liking for “My sister Constance, Richard Plantagenet…and the death cup mushroom”. Here, Jackson tactfully uses the tricolon (metalanguage) to marry Merricat’s liking for Constance to notorious symbols of power that undermine the docility traditionally associated with female identity. Evoking Merricat’s digression from social codes, Jackson implies (analytical/interpretive term) how the bond between Merricat and Constance is seemingly powerful. However, Jackson follows this illustration with the subversion of the gothic trope as Merricat “lock[s]” the gate, emphasising how the “village people have always hated us”. Through this depiction, Jackson cultivates an unnerving tone, elliptically foreshadowing the hostility that permeates the public domain embodied by the village. Accordingly, Jackson uses the gate as a protective metaphor for Merricat and Constance’s sisterhood as it shields them from the village, allowing them to embrace both isolation and self-sufficiency. Jackson confirms this perspective by revealing the antagonism embodied by the external world. This is seen in Jackson’s portrayal of Merricat shopping for groceries. In this scene, the author capitalises on sibilance to evoke an unsettling tonal atmosphere as Merricat “always stood perfectly straight and still”. This illustration allows Jackson to position Merricat's vulnerability, suggesting how the village’s hostility marginalizes her power.  This perspective is amplified by the author’s use of volatile imagery as she likens the female shoppers to a “flock of taloned hawks…striking…with razor claws” (Ellipses are used to shorten the quote). Pairing this violent manifestation with the fragmented nature of Merricat’s narration, Jackson poses the village as a hostile domain where the villagers strive to suppress Merricat’s sense of autonomy. Thus, by establishing the village as an unbecoming arena, Jackson attaches greater weight to the protective nature of sisterhood. This is structurally witnessed as Jackson pairs Merricat’s return to the Blackwood Estate, a symbol for the sisters’ seclusion, with heightened feelings of autonomy. References to heightened autonomy emerge through Jackson’s portrayal of Merricat and Constance “eat[ing] away the year”, revealing how their sisterhood enables a self-sufficient way of living insulated from the hostility of the outside world (The quote is altered through square brackets). By revealing how Merricat and Constance do “not ask from anyone,” Jackson amplifies the pertinence of sisterhood as a protective factor that fosters a mutual relationship and shields the characters from a hostile society. Thus, by foregrounding self-reliant sisterhood, Jackson casts sisterly bonds as a shield against an antagonistic world (Linking Sentence).

Constructing a more nuanced examination, Jackson highlights how sisterhood becomes a source of entrapment when threatened by patriarchal impositions (Topic Sentence). Across Jackson’s novella, the absence of the family patriarch John Blackwood, enables the sisters to construct a distinctly gynocentric reality (Context Cue). This dynamic is embodied in Constance’s ritual of giving Merricat “treasures” to bury, which materializes the reciprocal strength of their sisterly bond that sustains both characters.  As Merricat’s superstition turns these treasures into a “powerful taunt web”, Jackson highlights the strength of sisterhood, using the web to symbolize a matriarchal sanctuary that is created through the sisters’ mutual relationship. However, this sense of sisterly equilibrium is overthrown through the arrival of Charles (Context Cue). By pairing Charles’ arrival with the illustration of a “fallen…book”, one of Merricat’s treasures, Jackson creates a foreboding atmosphere by interrupting a ritual that cements the sisters’ bidirectional bond. This perspective is confirmed as Constance leaves the kitchen synonymised as the “heart” of the Blackwood home “unguarded”, to attend to Charles. Here, Jackson’s symbolically charged depiction highlights how the kitchen, the space that binds Merricat and Constance, is made precarious and open to exploitation within an androcentric social order. Thus, as Merricat feels “wound round tight with wire”, Jackson deliberately pairs Charles’ arrival with emerging feelings of entrapment and suppression. Using this portrayal, Jackson foreshadows how Charles’ arrival at the Blackwood Estate threatens the liberating nature of the characters’ sisterhood. Jackson illustrates this through the character arc of Constance, who becomes increasingly contaminated by the patriarchal values Charles brings into the Estate (Context based analysis). Voicing this sentiment is Merricat’s anxiety about Constance wearing “our mother’s pearls”, a symbol of submissive femininity, that are “better off in the box”. Herein, a feminist reading of Jackson’s novella suggests that Constance’s gradual acceptance of masculine hegemony weakens her ability to sustain her bond with Merricat. Under Charles’s ideological influence, Constance’s remark that Merricat “should have boyfriends”, introduces the unnerving assumption of compulsive heterosexuality that structures patriarchal norms and juxtaposes the sisters’ former rejection of male influence (Context based analysis). Thus, as Constance’s patriarchal worldview pushes Merricat into an oppressive order, Jackson suggests how their relationship becomes psychologically entrapping for the protagonist.  Hence, by revealing how patriarchy distorts individual worldviews, Jackson shows how sisterhood, when infiltrated with androcentric values, generates an atmosphere of imprisonment (Linking Sentence). 

Despite suggesting how sisterhood can both protect and entrap characters, Jackson ultimately emphasizes its power to liberate characters from constraining gender roles (Topic Sentence). Within the patriarchal world of Jackson’s novella, the defiance of stereotypes is married to societal ostracization.  This becomes evident in the fire sequence, where the villagers’ collective cry to “burn “the Blackwood sisters in “the house”, echoes the persecutory impulse of a witch hunt (analysis of a key moment).  The atmosphere of a witch hunt is further evoked by Jackson’s use of synecdoche homogenizing the villagers as a mindless “crowd”. By favouring to kill the Blackwood sisters whose sororal relationship challenges the currency of male-dominance, Jackson highlights how patriarchal communities preserve their power by violently eliminating women who exist outside sanctioned roles, casting Merricat and Constance as symbolic threats whose very bond destabilises the village’s gendered order (contextual analysis).  Read through this lens, the sisters’ collective escape from the burning house allows Jackson to cast them as symbolic ‘witches’  who evade the patriarchal violence that is directed to annihilate them. In doing so, Jackson characterises the sororal bond between Merricat and Constance as a protective force from a social order that aims to either relegate them to powerless feminine roles or eradicate them completely. Thus, in the novella’s closing sequences, Jackson highlights how sisterhood empowers Merricat and Constance to lead a lifestyle that is divorced from the expectations of America’s patriarchal milieu in the 1960s (contextual analysis). After the fire, Merricat and Constance “establish new patterns” in their lifestyle, suggesting their complete departure from prevailing social expectations. Jackson illustrates this through the sisters’ rejection of landmarks from the paternal Blackwood lineage such as John Blackwood’s staircase which was formerly depicted as “one of the wonders of this country”. In rejecting the masculine dominance embodied by the staircase and instead creating “new landmarks”, in the kitchen, a female arena, Jackson illustrates how the sisters reconfigure a conventional domestic sphere into a matriarchal domain that reflects their reclaimed power (Linking Sentence).   By aligning this depiction with the sisters’ symbolic reclamation of female agency, embodied in their use of maternal crockery that had never been “use[d]...before”, Jackson highlights their refusal to become submissive Blackwood wives who “always did as they were told” (Quote and Analysis). Read through a feminist perspective, Jackson’s choice to end with a sisterhood flourishing outside patriarchal structures underscores how sisterly bonds allow characters to find freedom from gendered expectations that would otherwise confine them (Linking Sentence).

Intrinsically, Jackson’s feminist aesthetics allow for a nuanced construction of sisterhood. While the novella exposes how sisterly bonds can both shelter and confine characters, Jackson ultimately emphasises their liberating potential (Summary). This is crystallized in the novella’s closing line, where Constance’s exclamation “I am so happy!”, highlights the transformative power of the sisters’ unity. By framing this moment as release from patriarchal shackles instead of an escape into delusion, Jackson suggests that sisterhood equips women to resist the gendered pressures of patriarchal American society and claim a life defined by greater autonomy (Synthesis).

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Written by KIS Academics Tutor for VCE Legal Studies, Psychology, English and Literature,  Sonnet Pandit. Sonnet is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Sonnet achieved perfect scores in English and Psychology and above 40 in all her subjects. Request her as a tutor here.